January 28th

Just before writing this week’s news I was arranging payment for our flights to visit Andrew et al in June. Everything progressed all the way through to the press “Confirm” to complete the deal. Then the internet dropped out.

No doubt it’ll come back in due course, and hopefully sufficiently well for me to send out this email, but I expect I’ll have to go through the entire process of entering the transaction details all over again. Ggrrr! I do look forward to reliable high-speed broadband when we’re in the UK.

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All this week was spent in Goroka; I flew down first thing on Monday morning, and returned around lunch time on Friday. It was a satisfying week. The CRM course I mentioned last week seemed to go well and there was good interaction with the two pilots doing it. From my perspective the course was much more practical and relevant to our type of flying than more theoretical courses I’ve run in the past.

On Thursday and Friday I flew with Glenys to do her Twin Otter type rating training. She did well and it is always really nice as a trainer to have a good student. Next week she’ll have her official type rating flight test with an examiner from CASA PNG, after which she’ll be able to start her line training and going out on ‘real’ flights.

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After a week away it was obviously nice to get back home, but it has also been nice to catch up with the families in Goroka, having a meal each evening with four of them.

One evening I had a game of squash, my first in about four years, with Brad Venter. He thrashed me, unfortunately! Even allowing for not having played recently, I did notice that I simply cannot run as fast as I used to, though I’m still searching for some underlying reason as to why this might be. I have been a bit stiff afterwards, though not as bad as I could have been, but my legs were still protesting when I went for a run this morning.

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The new CEO for MAF International, Dave Fyock, is visiting PNG for the first time at the moment. It’s something of a lightning tour, taking advantage of his being on this side of the globe for some meetings, so I expect that he’ll do a longer visit at some stage.

During yesterday afternoon there was an Australia Day celebration at the Kagamuga compound near the airport, an opportunity for our Australian colleagues to demonstrate their Ozzie-ness, which some of them did magnificently. There were certainly some aspects of Ozzie culture Dave hadn’t experienced before, and he joined in very well.

In the evening he joined Nicki and me for a light meal, and we greatly appreciated the opportunity to get to know him a bit and to chat through some issues MAF PNG is dealing with. It was a good evening.

So, all in all, it’s been a good week.

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I have my own periodic instrument rating flight test on Wednesday, so I’ll need to do a bit of preparation for that. I’m flying Dave and Todd (Country Director) to Goroka tomorrow morning, but will work in the office there while they go about their business, and then bring them back to Hagen in the afternoon. I have a normal operational day of flying on Friday if I remember my roster correctly, so the other days will be office time, which I will not have any difficulty filling up.

Have a great week.

January 21st

I guess that if I asked somebody what they did yesterday evening, and they replied, “Sat at our dining table and watched some flowers open,” then my response, not spoken, would be, “Sad!” Therefore, by my own definition, Nicki and I must be sad cases.

However, I justify the activity (which was actually not the only thing we did yesterday evening) as being in the interests of my photography hobby. If I can get anything to upload today (a struggle at the moment) it should be on my Facebook page.

If the BBC Natural History team can make an entire documentary series about the Private Life of Plants, done with time lapse photography, then why shouldn’t I?!

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Since handing over my role as FOM I have noticed some decrease in the volume of emails, but not as much as might have been expected. It does seem strange being in the office, carrying on with some (though not all) of the projects I was working on previously, but no longer being ultimately responsible for them. 

One project, getting our synthetic flight trainer up and running again, is just about complete. I need another UPS to guard against power cuts, which will hopefully arrive this week. After that it will be ready for its fidelity check, which I hope might be possible next week. This is its inspection and approval by a Flying Operations Inspector, that will allow us to use it for training and be able to log our instrument flight time in it, plus maintain our currency on different types of instrument approach.

The new hardware is so much better than the old. It looks very similar, but the controls are much smoother and no longer over-sensitive. It makes operating it much nicer, and also means that some emergency procedures can be practised, where previously it was virtually impossible to keep the “aeroplane” flying.

On Wednesday I conducted a flight test for Ryan Cole, one of our pilots newly returned from leave. As part of his instrument proficiency check we flew to an airport about 30 minutes flight time away to conduct a type of instrument approach that is only available there and at the capital’s airport in Port Moresby. I estimate that by the time we’d flown there, conducted the approaches and flown back again, if the trainer had been available I’d have saved enough flight time to pay about a quarter of the cost of the upgrade.

 

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Our car had a very overdue clean yesterday. Although the last couple of days have been mostly dry, prior to that we’ve had a lot of rain which has turned potholes into ponds. Needless to say, mud splashes everywhere, and passing vehicles add to the coating. Even torrential rain hasn’t washed it off. I did the outside during the morning, while Nicki did the inside during the afternoon, while I cut up pieces of wood for the next packing crate. Progress is being made.

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Not long before we return to PNG in June, we’re planning a trip to visit Andrew & Querida and the boys, and also have a night or two with our friends Jack & Helen Keegan in Raleigh. We have some quotes for the tickets and only need to decide which day we return. We could have an extra day and arrive back at 05:00 on Monday morning, but there’s a 40th reunion for my year at vet school that evening which we intend to get to.

Decisions, decisions! An extra day, but an early arrival and motorway drive, followed by an evening suffering from jetlag, or one day less and still an evening suffering from jetlag, but with possibly an easier drive to Bristol. I’ll let you know the decision in due course.

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Just as the sermon was about to start in church this morning a friend came and asked for help urgently. She had been returning to the service when a man, we found out later a visiting pastor, had collapsed in front of her, fallen head first on to a concrete pad, and stayed where he’d fallen.

By the time we reached him he was starting to come round, though very groggy and with a nasty bruise and scrape on his forehead. We learnt that he was a relative of our pastor and that he was bringing his daughter back from his village to take her to school (the new school year starts this week). He’d stayed in the lowlands for a while and had contracted malaria, and as with most village people, he hadn’t access to treatment, so the disease progressed until it caused him to collapse.

We took him to the Hagen hospital with his daughter and our pastor’s wife, not the most sanitary place on the planet, but at least he should be able to get appropriate treatment and should be OK.

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I’ll be in Goroka all this week to conduct the Crew Resource Management part of a Twin Otter ground school for two new First Officers. The course lasts 2 to 2½ days, and then on Thursday and Friday I’ll do the aircraft endorsement training for one of them, Glenys Watson from New Zealand who arrived with her family in October last year.

I’m looking forward to doing some training again.

Enjoy the video. I won’t be watching flowers open this evening.

January 13th 2018

I thought I might as well start catching up on two weeks’ worth of news, and the first News for 2018, on a Saturday afternoon since the noise of the generator running tends to preclude any idea of a quiet and peaceful time doing anything else. 

At about 11 p.m. on Thursday night the power went off and so far, at 3:17 p.m. on Saturday, it is still off. Reports are that a tree went down on the power line about 30km east of Mount Hagen, but after that another fault occurred in Chimbu Province, further east again down the highway. 

Police are reported to have had to accompany power workers to the Chimbu location after local landowners blocked access and demanded compensation. Gggrrrr. The compensation demands over things like this hold PNG back in their own version of the Dark Ages, along with their witch hunts and sorcery killings.

Anyway, we are glad to have the generator whirring away and keeping fridge and freezer temperatures down, and to allow us to recharge computers, phones and other electronic gadgets, but it will be nice to have peace and quiet along with a return of power in due course.

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Nicki didn’t sleep well on Wednesday night, possibly because of the noise from the club, which still disturbs the sleep of local residents in the area. The effect of a sleep deficit were unfortunately evident on Thursday when she locked the keys in the car when she went shopping, and later on reversed into a fence pole as she manoeuvred out of one of our compounds where she’d been visiting somebody. 

I guess that cars have bumpers to protect against events like this, but they do look better when they’re straight! Fortunately there’s nothing that requires repairing.

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It’s amazing how many cables of different varieties are necessary to put the synthetic flight trainer together. Two mice (or are they mouses when applied to a computer?), the rudder pedal unit, control console, avionics box, and a software key fill up the USB slots. A VGA cable connects one monitor, and a DVI-D the other – this was a variety of cable I hadn’t come across before and I had to order an 8m version to replace the supplied 1.8m one that was too short.

I sometimes think that it would be easier if everything was wireless, which is the way the world is going. Then I feel concerned that we will all end up microwaved. Maybe cables are safer after all, providing you don’t trip over them!

Thus far I haven’t managed to get the sound part of the device working, so will solicit help from our IT department and/or avionics engineer next week. After which I will tidy up all the cables so that the likelihood of tripping over them is reduced, and also so that when our cleaner comes in to wash the floor with overly liberal amounts of water, nothing electric gets washed at the same time.

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My other primary task this week has been rewriting the Crew Resource Management course which I’ll be running next week, i.e. w/b 22nd Jan. I ran the course in September and didn’t have time to make the major revision I wanted to; this time I should have the revision completed. I hope that it will make a substantial improvement, and also make it much more relevant to what we do, covering topics like situational awareness, leadership and teamwork, decision making, error management from a practical and less theoretical perspective.

One topic that particularly interests me is culture. MAF is particularly cross-cultural and works cross-culturally day in and day out, so I’ve included it in CRM courses for years. The aviation industry finally caught up with MAF and it is now part of at least the European CRM syllabus.

The syllabus covers national, professional and organisational culture, and how that impacts flight crew interactions and the safety of flight operations. So far they have not included generational culture, which again I have done for a while, and which, with national culture, I place ahead of professional and organisational cultures in terms of importance.

It is interesting to have a look at key social and international events, attitudes to work, family, religion, money, technology and other topics between generations – my parents, the veterans or traditionalists; myself, a so-called boomer; then the Gen X and on to the Gen Y or millennials. 

Attitudes across the generations are poles apart, so it’s not surprising when somebody like myself has a strong difference of opinion of what is important with a person in their mid- or early-20s.

Once upon a time generational attitudes were very slow to change; these days they change with each decade, or at least every 20-25 years.

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And talking about generations, it’s nice having a couple of little people staying on the compound at the moment. Tim & Laura Neufeld are some of our newest arrivals, Tim has just started his pilot training. They have Hannah, who is 4, and Ethan who is 6 months. Next door are Luke & Catherine Newell, just returned from leave, with little Lydia who is a bit over one year.

Hannah loves kicking a ball around, so after work another grandfather (a temporary resident of our compound who has started Tim’s training) and myself have enjoyed playing with her.

Meanwhile, Lydia loves carrying a floor mop around wherever she goes. It is usually kept outside their front door, but almost every time she comes out she collects her mop and walks around with it. I’m sure she will be a great help to her mother in due course!

Yes, it’s obvious and true, I miss my grandkids! 

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Nicki is hand-making some bread as the bread machine would place quite a high demand on the power supply. It appears that there is a consensus to go for a meal at the Sweet Spot, a local restaurant, tonight so that others can do the cooking and washing up. Sounds like a good plan!

I hope that you have a quiet and peaceful week undisturbed by generators, loud rock-and-roll music, thumping bass drums, drunken hollering or anything similar. Despite all of the above, when I went for a run this morning I was greeted very warmly and friendlily by everybody I met, and was appreciated when I helped push a Land Cruiser in an attempt (unsuccessful unfortunately) to bump start it.