October 22nd

For the last month the Seventh Day Adventists have had open air meetings on the sports ground across the road from us. In all fairness, it has been nothing like some previous events of theirs, either in volume or length of each day’s service as they’ve usually finished about 8:30 p.m. Nonetheless, some speakers were loud enough to make conversation a challenge, so it will be nice to have our evenings back.

On two occasions in the last couple of years the SDAs have led the Hagen community in organising a massive clean-up of all the rubbish and filth that gets dropped around the town. Since the town authority seems incapable of doing the job itself, it is falling to the churches to keep the place clean. The SDAs took the initiative, organised their folk and vehicles to transport the bags of rubbish to the tip, and made the town look much cleaner and nicer. At the end of this month the Lutherans are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the reformation. With due acknowledgement to the SDAs, which was nice, they also organised a clean-up of the town, which took place yesterday morning. Eric Eribiang, our Administration Manager, is very much involved in the Lutheran Church, so he was authorised to use the MAF truck to transport collected rubbish to the tip.

Nicki and I went for a walk first thing in the morning and intended to join in to tidy up around our compound, but by the time we got back, they’d already done the job and moved on. It was very noticeable driving to church this morning how much better the town looked.

************ 

Walking, running or driving in town or around the area it is now sadly commonplace to get children and youths call out, “Waitskin”, “Waitman” or, for Nicki, “Waitmeri”. In Tok Pisin “Wait” is the colour white and is pronounced the same, so you can work out what the words mean. I can’t recall seeing or hearing a child corrected by an adult, so they continue doing it. Yesterday, while out for our walk, a woman deliberately walked up to us with her young child saying, “Waitman, waitman”. Children who are unused to mixing with white people are often nervous, so this woman was deliberately freaking her child out. What sort of woman does that sort of thing to their child?

Fortunately, the vast majority of people are pleasant and greet us with a smile and a friendly, “Hello” or “Good morning”. The name calling behaviour irritates and annoys; it’s unnecessary and backward. Not infrequently when youths do it they’re drunk or have been smoking marijuana, so we just avoid and ignore them. Now put yourself in the position of a single young woman working for MAF (or anybody else for that matter). She was driving past the airport terminal concentrating on the potholes when a well-dressed man in a suit yelled out, “Waitmeri!” She ignored him, sensibly, so he yelled out again, “I said, ‘Waitmeri!’”. Behaviour like that is inexcusable in any country and against any race. It is rude, vulgar, ignorant, abusive, intimidating and whole lot more adjectives.

Any country that wants to drag itself into civilisation will have to rise above its citizens calling other people names. Then I look around the world and don’t see many countries that are dragging themselves into civilisation. If anything, it looks like we’re all heading back to the stone age and tribal warfare, hopefully not nuclear. PNG can provide global education on tribal warfare if required, albeit with conventional weaponry.

************ 

Tomorrow is the start of the annual pilots’ meetings. They’re always a lot of work to prepare for, and I will have to work evenings next week to complete my sessions. It’s good to get everybody together to cover the legally required training, rather than doing it piecemeal with other checks throughout the year. The interaction always provides a more thorough refresher of things like emergency procedures, knowledge of procedures and air law, or safety management system and so on. By themselves these topics would be pretty tedious to review, but delegate them out and encourage creativity, and we usually have some very enjoyable sessions.

************ 

The Flight Operations department has a very efficient and effective assistant, Doris Kelwau. She is excellent and highly appreciated; without her Flight Ops would definitely not function as well as it does. For the last couple of years Doris has been working at an Australian TAFE (Technical Further Education) Cert. IV course in Business Administration under MAF sponsorship. She completed her assignments and heard that she’d passed the course a couple of months ago, but last weekend her certificate arrived. I formally presented to her after our morning devotions on Tuesday. She had every reason to be proud, and we are all very proud of her.

Have a good week, hopefully without anybody calling you any names!

October 15th

The best part of conducting flight tests is when the pilot passes the check. The worst part is when they don’t. I did a total of three flight checks this week, two for one pilot and one for another, and both passed. It was a good week!

************

MAF PNG is in the process of adding Electronic Flight Bags, or EFBs for short, to the equipment pilots carry. Everybody else knows the devices as iPads, but EFB is the aviationese word for them.

At their best, they can carry all necessary documentation, including the aircraft flight manual (a weighty tome), all the avionics manuals, and every manual, operating procedure, advisory document, operational memo and so on that any organisation can dream up. Believe me, MAF is very good at dreaming up manuals and paperwork!

Our EFBs link to our satellite tracking system, which is one of the best safety improvements MAF has ever invested in as we know where our aircraft are all of the time. Dream on Air Malaysia and MH370. With the link comes the ability to send alerts for any emergencies, and text messages. The latter is hugely useful when it comes to sending information such as changes of plan, medical evacuations, arrival times, fuel requirements and load available. Overall, this must be saving us money already.

Additionally, they have the potential for calculating load data, aircraft weight and balance values, load manifests and more. But this will have to wait until they have official approval.

There are some teething issues that I’m sorting out to make them a bit more user friendly.

Firstly, with the mass of manuals and documents that MAF has, many will never be needed while a pilot is flying, so to thin down the volume of documents I want to sort out only those that are necessary to have in an aircraft.

Secondly, working with others we’ll develop a user-friendly way of renaming the manuals to make them easier to find. For example, our Twin Otter operating procedures are grandly titled: MPGO.SOP.09 - DHC6 SOP - Amdt 13  - 10 Aug 2016 – Print.pdf. I reckon that DHC6 SOP 13 would do just fine! Some negotiation on renaming may be necessary, but I’m sure a better protocol will be achievable.

The next hurdle to full utilisation is officialdom. The government Advisory Circular on having EFBs approved is, if I remember correctly, 52 pages long. The time and energy to drive this project is more than I can give at the moment, so for the moment we’ll have to settle for getting rid of some manuals in our aircraft that aren’t legally required, which at least is a start.

A practical challenge to using iPads is that periodically Apple, like any other manufacturer, issues updates. The latest big update came out recently, all 1.15GB of it. I had 15 devices in my office this week trying to download 1.15GB each over a not very fast internet connection. I got there in the end and it was a slow process, though obviously I let them get on with the download and didn’t have to sit watching them.

************

Yesterday a 12.5km run up Rondon Ridge, followed by some energetic hedge cutting and flower bed digging, left me sufficiently weary to not want to run again today. I still have an ambition to make it to the top of Rondon Ridge, 10km from home, and back, without stopping. I’ve done it once with periodic stretches of walking, but we’ll see if one day I make it all the way.

************

The garden is beginning to look much better from the effort I’ve put into it recently. Nicki has done quite a lot of pruning, including our extremely vicious but very tasty variety of blackberry cum black raspberry that grows well in our garden. When I say vicious, I mean vicious! It makes the worst-thorned UK blackberry seem positively benign.

************

I don’t have any flying scheduled for this week. Two days are tied up with meetings, and the other three will have to include preparation for pilots’ meetings which are at the start of the following week. While I’ve kept on top of the organisation of the pilots’ meetings, working with Brad Venter, who’s Crew Training Manager, I haven’t yet done anything at all for the sessions I’m taking. That will have to change!

Have a good week.

October 8th

The week in Telefomin was very enjoyable. Consistent flying, rather than the sporadic opportunities I usually get, enabled me to regain my proficiency. It’s nice, and very helpful, to be able to put the wheels down where you want to on airstrips that don’t have very much in the way of margins!

During the week, the aircraft was used as a hearse (three times), a delivery truck (for building and food supplies) and a bus (for passengers). There was no need this time for it to be a fuel tanker since fuel stocks in Telefomin were quite good.

I was told that the hospital in Tabubil is requiring that the bodies of deceased patients are removed promptly. I think that in the past relatives took their time to make the transport arrangements, consulting with all the family members and so on, whereas now, they have to get on with the flight. Consequently, charters to repatriate bodies back to their home community for burial are happening regularly.

Since MAF provides the only service out of Tabubil to surrounding communities, I presume that if we can’t do a flight, the body has to be driven three to four hours to Kiunga, and then flown using one of aircraft operators based there.

When the aircraft is used as a truck or a bus it is very easy to miss exactly what, or who, you’re carrying and why. One lot of building materials looks just like any other load. An aircraft full of passengers seems the same as any full passenger flight. However, looking down the load manifest I found that on one flight the building materials were for a school classroom.

On another flight the bales of rice, tins of fish, bottles of oil and boxes of soap were for the high school in Tekin, the one run by Glenda Giles whom I’ve mentioned before.

The passenger list showed medical transfers from Telefomin hospital, which hasn’t had a doctor for several years (though there is hope one, or more, may arrive in the near future) to Tabubil. Students were flown to school, as well as passengers going about their own business.

We stopped at one airstrip to pick up two medical evacuations. The first was an older woman who had fallen on one of the mountain tracks and broken some ribs. She was moving very carefully as you’d expect, but not a squeak of pain or complaint. I don’t know when she fell, but she’d probably been waiting for us for at least a day, possibly two.

From the same community was a man who was jaundiced and who, we were told, was passing urine the colour of coffee. I’ve no idea how long he’d taken to reach the stage where it was thought a good idea to send him to hospital, but I’m sure it was longer than I’d have been prepared to wait! I hope that he’ll be OK.

It is so nice to get out of the office and back to the sharp end of our work.

**************

In the meantime, Nicki did her usual amazing job of making Telefomin home and keeping up with her safety work, preparing for the two orientation courses she has coming up, working on a photobook (the internet in Telefomin is good these days) and planning accommodation for staff in Mount Hagen.

**************

On Friday I was flying again, but this time in my role as a checking pilot, so not so much fun. Then back to the office for a while and some problems to solve which will occupy me somewhat during the next few days.

**************

Most of yesterday was spent in the garden, trimming our hedge and weeding and reorganising one of our larger flower beds. The latter is a work in progress which will take a while longer to complete. Butterfly gingers, red cannas and amaryllis (now known as hippeastrum, I think) had taken over and need to be brought under control. The white and pink candy-striped amaryllis are the same as the ones grown in pots in the UK, but which flower and reproduce very freely here.

That’s all for now. Have a good week.