September 30th

I had some good news this week.

During initial captaincy training and occasionally during periodic checks and recurrency training in the Twin Otter, we shut down an engine in flight and go through the process of an airstart. I’ve done it many times over the years and most recently during Volkher’s and Greg’s recurrency training that I’ve mentioned in recent weekly letters.

Following Greg’s training the engine we shut down showed some signs of deterioration on the daily engine trend monitoring we do. Exactly why was the major question that we were all asking. I could think of nothing that had been done that was different from any other occasion. The engine had to be removed, split and its hot section, where the fuel is burned to produce the power, sent off to the overhaul shop. At one stage we thought it might be necessary to replace all 58 turbine blades, at about $2,000 US dollars each. Ouch.

It was with great relief that we learnt this week that while there had been some rub on the blades, they weren’t seriously damaged, and that the problem has been seen by the overhaul shop resulting from other airstarts. The blade rub was the result of differential cooling after the engine was shut down. If we’d waited a couple of minutes longer before restarting, the problem would never have occurred.

With the Otters being phased out it is unlikely that anybody else will need to do a practice airstart, but in the meantime I am very, very relieved that nothing wrong was done, the risk of a recurrence is easily prevented, and that I am not responsible for over $100,000 of engine damage!

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This week was entirely an office week. I’ve caught up on quite a few tasks, but never quite caught up completely. There were some other maintenance issues this week (not with the Otters) that unexpectedly took up quite a lot of time, and those are still ongoing. In contrast, I’ll be flying every day this coming week, Monday to Wednesday down in Goroka again.

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Looking ahead to next year, I’ve entered for the Milton Keynes Half-Marathon again. I hope that it won’t be as hot as last year, but I also hope that it won’t be pouring with rain and blowing a gale. I’m not sure which would be worse.

Unfortunately, by May I will probably have lost most of the benefit of altitude training: 18.89 km this morning, my longest for a long while. The time of 2 hours 13 minutes is not brilliant, but the 536 metre altitude gain (and back down again), that’s 1,759’, provides some excuse. On the flat I think there’d be a reasonable chance of breaking the 2 hour barrier on a half-marathon, which is my goal for next May.

After mostly cloudy skies for the last couple of weeks, with some very difficult weather for some of our pilots to work, yesterday and today have been gloriously sunny.

Running (interspersed with walking spells) up Rondon Ridge this morning gave stunning views of the Hagen Range and Mount Giluwe (over 14,000’ high), with golden morning sunshine making the mountains glow.

A new road is in the process of construction up on to the ridge, so rather than come down the way I went up, I explored new territory.

The views as I ran down continued to be stunning. For the first part of the descent the road was excellent, well graded and smooth with bridges over the streams. As I got closer to town, construction is still underway.

I had to slow down, find a way around muddy patches and also to cross some larger streams. I chickened out of walking across one substantial chasm on two fallen tree trunks, preferring to climb a bit higher and find a track that the bulldozers were using. Local people invited me to cross another, smaller stream along a thick bamboo. They would cross it without even slowing; I went down to the stream, jumped across and climbed up the other side. Fortunately, the dry couple of days had made the mud firm, but I wouldn’t want to follow that route after a lot of recent rain.

All along the route there were friendly greetings from the local people. In some places the people have seen me before, but down the new road I am quite likely the first white runner they’ll have seen. Good fun and great to be out on such a lovely morning.

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Dave and Jane arrive next Sunday, which we’re very much looking forward to. After a few days in Hagen we’ll all be off to Telefomin for ten days. I’m not sure how much weekly news will be forthcoming during this time.

September 23rd

Plastic noise.

Lying on my back in the grass on the edge of a meadow in spring. The sun warm on my face. Wind rustling young leaves in the hedgerow behind me. The bleat of a sheep. The bark of a dog in the distance. The cawing of a crow flying overhead, and high in the sky, the melody of a lark …

Mist obscuring the horizon as waves gently lap the shore. Chill, with slight moistness in the air. Hidden in the gullies between the beds of cordgrass, the bubbling cry of a curlew, the whistle of the oystercatcher, the sharper call of the redshank.

Peace, though not silence. Uplifting. Soothing. Rich. Glorious.

Public attempts at acapella close harmony, best kept for an audience of private enthusiasm. Bulls-horn speakers blasting a message in 360°, so the world, not just the gathering in front of the platform has to hear, like it or not. “What was that you said? I couldn’t hear you.” …

Drunken revelling into the small hours of the morning, or even the not so small hours. A stereo with a volume control disproportionate to the size of building. “It’s ear plugs again tonight!”

Blaring. Invasive. Intrusive. Aggravating. Abrasive.

Noise pollution, like plastic, man-made. At least once the source is disconnected it doesn’t hang around for centuries.

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Catching up has been the outcome of this week. Catching up, but not feeling caught up. There’s always another something-new that arrives, or an unexpected outcome from one of the tasks you thought you’d complete quickly, or the meeting that goes on longer than expected and now needs another meeting to complete.

Progress made, at least. The To Do list is shorter than it was.

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Familiar territory is underwater. Conway, our home for 20 months in South Carolina is feeling the effects of the massive amount of rain dumped by Hurricane Florence. Ironically perhaps, Florence is a major town in South Carolina to which I often flew to practise instrument approaches.

We’re wondering how friends are getting on there. Nicki has just downloaded photos from news pages showing streets familiar to us completely covered by the flood. Waccamaw, Pee Dee, Crab Tree Swamp, all those low-lying, twisting rivers and creeks that sinuate their way across Horry County have burst their banks and flooded not just Conway, but other nearby towns as well.

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One-way tickets home. It’s a strange idea after 25 years of return tickets. In 1994 one-way Thai Air tickets, the now obsolete paper variety, took us from Heathrow, via a refuelling stop in New Delhi, to Bangkok and then to Melbourne. Our first experience of really long-haul flight, and Philip being swooned over by lovely Thai stewardesses. In those days he was blonde and beautiful and very cute.

Since then it’s always been return tickets, even if the exact return date wasn’t known. But now, the one-way will complete our full-time service in PNG. Even if we do return for short-term assignments, a topic still under consideration, the return tickets will be UK to here and back, rather than PNG to there and back.

Mind you, the one-way tickets we’re considering aren’t exactly direct. The abbreviated version looks like this:

Hagen-Moresby-Cairns-Brisbane-Auckland-(then by car)-Tauranga-Napier-(back to the air)-Christchurch-(then car again)-Queenstown, Invercargill and Dunedin-Christchurch-(back to the air)-Melbourne-Heathrow (via wherever whichever airline we fly lands at to refuel).

Whatever we do, we do intend to be in the UK by early April at the latest, having caught up with some friends and seen parts of New Zealand that are on our bucket-list of places to visit. This will be several Christmas and birthday presents combined with our Ruby wedding celebrations overdue from last July.

Anything else we do in the future will have to find an equally good justification, but this trip looks like using up all the current credit vouchers we’ve stored up by not being very good at organising presents for each other.

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Yes, I did kill my rhubarb by subjecting it to a sudden decrease in temperature. In retrospect I should have tried hardening it off by short periods in the fridge first, rather than plunging its ambient temperature by 70°C. That wouldn’t have done me much good either.

Before attempting to resurrect the rhubarb I did cover the bed with well-rotted compost. It appears that the well-rotted compost still had lots of seeds in it, many unidentified and now removed, but others that are definitely tomatoes. I therefore now have a bed with ten or so healthy tomato plants that I hope will yield fruit in their season.

May you have a great week unpolluted by plastic noise.

September 9th

Most of this week was spent in the office, so not much news of interest. I had been scheduled to fly Monday to Wednesday but unscheduled maintenance as a result of an engine problem meant the aircraft was in the hangar rather than out flying.

What I hope will be the last of the crates I need to build has been assembled, and all four have had the base and sides varnished. Just the tops to do, probably next week, then metal corners and some wooden ‘skids’ on the base, and the job is done.

I hope that we don’t then decide to take vast amounts home that won’t fit into what I’ve built! I don’t think that is too likely.

Dave & Jane are coming to stay for 2½ weeks in October, which we’re very much looking forward to. I’ll be covering for another pilot in Telefomin during that time, so their visit will be set out there rather than in Mount Hagen.

The club up the road has been very noisy again the last few nights, so it’s back to using ear plugs. After going all night there is still music playing there now, at just after 2 p.m. If it’s the same clientele, then I have to admire their stamina, but I think that a group of drunks rolled past our compound somewhere around 7 this morning.

Have a good week.

September 2nd

It’s been a long week, with several things not going as planned or anticipated. The sort of week where you just have to keep on going. The aircraft I’ve been using developed an engine fault, which has resulted in the engine being swapped out with one in our third Otter that has been parked for a while pending sale or a ferry flight to Mareeba. As a result the flying programme at the end of the week and the beginning of next has been badly disrupted.

Another aircraft, a GA8 this time, had a fuel pump problem, so on Monday I need to fly an engineer to Goroka to get the aircraft flying again.

Then there have been some admin issues that resulted in misunderstandings, which have fortunately been sorted out positively and quickly, but they all took time and energy.

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The week started off fine with Greg Falland and myself flying to Goroka and working the programme there for three days. Greg was based in Goroka for four years and so he was greeted as a long-lost friend at several of the airstrips we flew to.

An uncommon event was to take a young couple with baby twins back to their home community of Aziana (which has the shortest and steepest airstrip in the country) from Aiyura. That was rather special and lovely to see both husband and wife looking after the babies.

Greg did well and on Wednesday I was able to let him fly with Glenys Watson as FO. That was good for Glenys who hasn’t had much flying recently because of me training Volkher and then Greg, and good for me to have a few hours to catch up with some emails.

Glenys couldn’t fly all day as she had a dental appointment in the afternoon that she couldn’t change at short notice. I am absolutely certain she would have preferred flying to having a root canal done! I took over from her soon after midday, finished the day’s programme and then Greg and I returned to Hagen.

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Today has been nicely different. I needed to deal with some emails first thing, but after that I’ve been able to set my own pace for what I’ve been doing. What I hope is the last crate is ready for final assembly, after which it will only be the task of varnishing them all to seal the wood.

Years ago I bought a saw-bench from somebody who was leaving. While I haven’t used it every week, when I have needed it, it has been a huge blessing. As well as making the task of cutting plywood and battening to size very quick and easy, today I found I was short of a small amount of battening, so I was very quickly able to rip cut some pieces of timber that I had to the right width, and then hand plane them to remove a couple of millimetres to bring them to the right thickness.

I commented to Nicki that now I’ve finished building the crates, I hope that we use them all! We haven’t sorted out all our stuff yet, so don’t really know just how much we’ll sell and how much we’ll ship home. Ideally, the amount sent home will be kept to a minimum. But we have been here a long time … ! We’ll see.

Whether we use them all, or not, I’ve enjoyed making them.

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Other tasks on the horizon are to make inquiries of some shipping agents and to get some quotes. Then start thinking about flights home, via a holiday in Australia and New Zealand. There’s quite a lot to do and the time remaining is decreasing rapidly; we’re now into our final six months.

As I’ve flown around I’ve been aware for a while that for some of the lesser visited airstrips, any landing may be my last one. Places that I’ve loved going to in the years past, and interacting with the local people in the Finisterres in the east of the country are almost certainly memories as we rarely go to those places now, and certainly not from Hagen.

Change is a challenge, and leaving a country like PNG, and a ministry such as we’ve had here is hard.

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In October we will spend ten days in Telefomin, covering for the Axon family when the go to Australia for what we all hope will be their son Stephen’s final medical check. Stephen is the child who scalded himself very badly when he pulled boiling water over himself. He has healed up extremely well and it will be lovely if this does prove to be the last check.

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There’s no sign of the rhubarb I planted yet, and I wouldn’t be at all surprise if I killed it by trying to harden it off in the freezer. Since it wasn’t producing usable stalks it won’t be a big deal.

Everywhere is very wet again with plenty of rain after the few weeks of almost total dry after we came back. The hedge is certainly growing again.

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We’ve been watching a DVD lent to us by some friends produced by the Discovery Channel and about volcanoes around the world. As PNG is on the Pacific so-called Ring of Fire, volcanoes are relevant here, especially off the north coast. Manam volcano recently started erupting again, and earlier there was one not far from Wewak that resulted in all the islanders being evacuated.

It’s interesting, but rather repetitive and sensationalised. The general scenario for each programme is the question: “Will such and such a volcano blow up and plunge the world into darkness and destroy all the nearby major cities?”

The answer is always, “It could do”, but on the other hand, it might not. Or it might not for a very, very long time. We don’t know and even expert volcanologists don’t know.

Whether one or other of them, or all of them simultaneously, do explode, the one certain fact is that the BBC Natural History Unit produces much better documentaries than Discovery Channel!