December 30th

Late afternoon yesterday I was told that there would be a medevac flight this morning.

At 6:00 a.m. Sebastian Kurz took off from Goroka for Karkar Island, just off the coast north of Madang. A little 5 year-old girl had been trapped in a landslide and suffered serious leg and lower abdomen injuries. She was flown to Kundiawa in Chimbu Province where there is an excellent surgeon.

As I followed Sebastian’s flight on our satellite tracking system I was relieved to see him land as the weather there was reported to be not all that good. The surgeon was waiting at the airstrip to take her to hospital where he and his team will be spending the rest of the day in major reconstructive surgery.

Our prayers are with the girl and with the surgeon and his team.

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Just a few weeks ago and the weather was very dry. For the last couple of weeks it’s been the reverse, with little sun and lots of rain. As I was writing this, and without knowing what I was typing, Nicki said, “I think it is going to rain again. It has that sort of feeling about it!” I agree. Consequently many of the airstrips are soft and slippery.

Dusin was so boggy that I had to close it for the time being on Friday. It’s only 450m long and has an 8% slope. Taxiing down to the parking bay after landing and needing a lot of reverse thrust from the props as the brakes are just locking the wheels that continue to slide, is not much fun. Repeated use by aircraft in these conditions only leaves wheel ruts and makes everything worse, so it’s much better to wait until there’s a chance for the strip to dry out.

Two minutes later: It has started to rain (and the time is only 12:51) …

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After injuring my ankle at the end of September and then not running for 2 months, it is taking a bit of time to get going again. Nonetheless, progress is being made and yesterday I topped the 12km mark for the first time since the injury.

Timon Kundig is a new pilot, but also an engineer. He’s come with a view to flying when there’s a training slot for him later in 2019, but until then he’s helping to supervise and mentor our national engineers. He’s also a keen runner and so yesterday we went for a run together.

It’s interesting when running with somebody else how you tend to push yourself a bit more. I still had to pause at the end of a couple of hills as my stamina isn’t back where it was, but along the flat roads at the back of town, if I’d been by myself I’d have probably had another pause, but with Timon there I kept going – and made it back to the house OK. Presumably that is why some professional long-distance races are run with pacers.

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We went a short way out of town as far as a village called Willya where some friends of ours, Jeffrey and Martha, live.

Martha brought Nicki some very nice sweet potato, the orange coloured variety that we like most, as well as some taro, this week. Taro is a very starchy vegetable that highlanders love and quite regularly claim that the produce from their particular garden has more flavour than anywhere else. I have never found taro to have anything much more than an insipid, bland taste, though I admit that like any starchy vegetable, it does fill the belly.

When experimenting with some taro we were given once before I chopped and pressure cooked it, mixing it with salt, pepper and some chilli peppers from our garden – ones with a high explosive, though not nuclear rating. Looking round our garden I couldn’t find any red chillis, though there are plenty of green ones that will be ready in a few weeks. Instead I put in a teaspoonful of dried red peppers that Nicki had in her stocks. After I’d put a teaspoonful in, she told me a recipe that only required half a teaspoonful. I’m just about to drain, mash and sample the taro, so wait for the official taster’s verdict …

… Half a teaspoonful would have been better, but the mix, with about 4 oz of cheese folded in, is certainly palatable. The next stage is to make the mix into patties and then lightly fry in oil. I can then guarantee that the taro will have a lot more flavour than when it is just boiled, or steamed in a mumu.

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Our first crate is very nearly ready for final closure. The larger items were in it from a week ago, but yesterday we filled in most of the nooks and crannies. Once the final gaps are filled I’ll open a dessicant pot that’s placed in the bottom of the crate and close it up. Hopefully the dessicant will keep everything dry and mould free on the journey back to the UK.

So that’s about it for the last letter of 2018. Where did the year go?

Happy New Year.

December 23rd

Saturday 22nd: I decided I’d done enough packing up and putting things in crates about half an hour ago. It was good timing as the rain has started now and although the crates are protected under the house, it still makes everything feel damp.

Two of the beside cabinets we had made for us are in a crate. Will we be able to fit in the other two, and the basketwork telephone table, and the basket work linen basket, and the trays, and … as well as the household items we want to send home as well. I foresee some hard decisions coming up.

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The last week hasn’t shown us the sun very much and I’ve had some fairly messy weather on the three days I was flying this week.

On Wednesday I was supposed to take some pastors to Bak, about 50 minutes flight time (= about 150 miles/240 km) west of Mount Hagen. I was flying with Glenys Watson and as we approached the Bak valley we could see it was covered with a layer of stratus cloud. After descending in the Strickland River valley, we could see the two characteristic V-shaped notches in ridge lines at the end of the valley, but beyond that it was grey, rainy and horrid. We both agreed we didn’t want to go there.

The nearest place to Bak is Tekin, in the adjoining valley, so we thought that they’d prefer there as a second choice. Climbing overhead Tekin a pilot on the ground from Central Aviation (Vern Bell, ex-MAF and with whom Nicki and I and the boys spent our first Christmas in PNG when Vern was based in Tari) heard us and called up on the radio to say not to bother trying. The weather was too bad for him to take off. He did get out eventually, but not until we’d left our passengers at Telefomin, refuelled and were well on our way back to Hagen.

Our next two rounds to Dusin were cancelled because of bad weather.

Thursday was a lot better, at least to start with. Glenys and I had to work quickly because the programme was a long one, but the good weather combined with quick turnarounds enabled us to get everything done. By the last round the weather had gone off.

From Tari we tracked north west to Wanakipa, more or less the opposite direction along the same route we’d just followed to get to Tari not much more than an hour before. This time we had to work around a thunderstorm, then climb above a layer of cloud, before finding a break to come back down in the valley near Wanakipa. Underneath the cloud was fine; it was just getting there that was hard work.

Back to Hagen was back up high again, above the terrain and a fortunately short bounce through some fairly active clouds with a couple of flashes of nearby lightning; then the rest of the way to Hagen in rain.

Come Friday the programme was supposed to be short because the MAF Hagen Christmas celebration was scheduled for the afternoon. The day started with fairly low cloud around Hagen, but easy enough to work around to get out, and to the north, where we were going, the ridges were clear. There was no problem reaching our destination, Gebrau, off-loading all the cargo and passengers and filling up with 34x50kg bags of coffee beans.

After a short turnaround and refuel in Hagen we headed back in much the same direction. Now the ridge lines and mountains were covered in cloud, though we were able to land at our first stop, Sengapi. From there to Simbai, only 10 minutes to the south-east. The airstrip was completely visible and nearly clear of clouds, but the approach up the valley had lots of puffs of cloud in the way. There was rain around as well, and while I felt for the 12 passengers in the back wanting to get home for Christmas, neither Glenys nor I felt inclined to find a way to get down low enough to see if we could, just, get in and land. It’s not just the landing to consider; there’s also the assessment of whether you can take off again afterwards. We went home to Hagen.

The next round to Kol, east of Hagen, was cancelled because of weather. First thing in the morning the agent reported cloud and rain. When we got back from Simbai he said it had cleared up and was fine. The load wasn’t completely ready and we thought it was too questionable to bother with, so we cancelled the flight, which was just as well because not long afterwards another report came through that it was raining and all closed in again.

It’s better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air, than in the air wishing you were on the ground!

It is, after all, the wet season at the moment!

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We’re having Christmas Eve as holiday instead of Boxing Day, so that staff can have a long weekend rather than two blocks of two days. Everybody has been working hard recently: the engineers have had a run of maintenance issues to deal with; for Finance, it’s the end of year audit; for pilots it’s the busy Christmas season. A bit of time out is welcome.

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Sun 23rd: Some more large items have been fitted into the crates – it’s now a case of making sure that they’re all properly padded to avoid damage in transit, especially the road journey from Hagen to Lae down the very rough and poorly maintained Highlands Highway. After that, providing nobody puts the prongs of a forklift truck through the side of any of the crates, there shouldn’t be too much of a risk.

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I’m aware that some people’s Christmas is a sad one. We’re sickened by the murder of the two Norwegian women in Morocco. Here in PNG the eldest son of a Lutheran pastor friend of ours was killed in a road accident last Monday. Two days ago a Wesleyan pastor died and last night and this afternoon I’ve been working out how we can fit in a flight to take his body back to his home community.

Peace and goodwill are part of the Christmas message and hope for the future, but in the meantime we have to work through the mess of human existence where they are far from evident. The banal Christmas decorations of Father Christmas and tinsel don’t do a lot for my sense of celebration. What does is the fact that God has intervened in human affairs with Christ’s first advent, and that there is a certain hope of joy and justice for the future which has infinitely more substance than glitter.

One of my favourite Christmas card banners is: Wise men (and women!) still seek Jesus.

May you have a very happy, joyous and peaceful Christmas.

December 16th

Nicki is rejoicing because her computer is up and running again, and she even managed to retrieve the data files between now and when she last backed everything up.

Great thanks and credit to the Apple support team, especially the supervisor, who spent hours, literally, on the phone at their expense talking Nicki through various processes to try and get it working.

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Apart from a flight in the C172, bringing it back from Goroka to Mount Hagen on Friday, all this week has been spent in the office.

The C172 flight turned out to be more interesting than anticipated. We have a young PNGian, Ricky, working in Flight Ops as a sort of executive secretary for Todd Aebischer, the Country Director (previously known as Programme Manager). Ricky is a licensed pilot but with not much flight experience, so when we have need to shuttle the C172, we try to give him the opportunity to fly under supervision.

All the way down to Goroka in the back of a Twin Otter I was looking at the mountain ranges to the north, and yes, it was lovely blue sky with the ridge lines clear. Rather than return by the most direct route I thought I’d give Ricky some experience navigating to the north of Mount Wilhelm and back to Hagen via the Jimi Valley.

That is what we did, but Ricky didn’t see many of the landmarks! By the time we’d done the daily inspection of the aircraft and left, the weather had changed remarkably and it wasn’t really ideal for a little underpowered Cessna 172.

We were able to work our way around the clouds without too much trouble, and weren’t even relying on the GPS, but Ricky was certainly out of his experience level and I was reminded of why I like IFR Twin Otters rather than VFR aircraft. Anyway, we arrived back without scaring me, but Ricky admitted he’d been a bit tense with his first encounter of having to work weather. While it wasn’t the navigation exercise and route familiarisation I’d planned, it was nonetheless a valuable lesson for him to see how not such good weather can be worked safely with options available the whole time.

I can remember when I was new in PNG being told by the then Chief Pilot that while you never like having to work weather, you do reach a stage where you know how to do it safely. Hopefully Ricky has taken his first step towards that, and I’ve been reminded that I still don’t like doing it, but can do it safely!

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One of the Otters has been grounded this week. During a routine inspection it was discovered that one of the engines had what is called Foreign Object Damage (FOD) in the first stage of the compressor. When a bit of stone (that’s what it usually is, though there was no debris this time to confirm) hits the compressor disk which is spinning at tens of thousands of times per minute, it doesn’t do much good! All credit to the engine manufacturers that it withstood the damage and the pilots had no idea it had happened!

The risk of FOD is one of those things pilots have to live with. Probably the most famous example in recent years was when a flock of Canada geese went through the engines of an Airbus A320 and Sully, the Captain, and his First Officer, put the aircraft down safely in the Manhattan River. Fortunately events like that are extremely rare; in fact that’s the only one I can recall. Most often damage is picked up, like ours was, on a routine inspection.

At one stage we thought the whole engine may have to be sent away for repair, but a specialist from the overhaul facility’s mobile repair team came up on Friday and has been able to dress out the damage and the compressor blades are still within acceptable limits. All being well the aircraft will be back in the air on Tuesday.

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Other news:

• The tomatoes I planted some weeks back look as though they are infected with blight. They’re the same family as potatoes and prone to the same diseases. Hopefully a few will be rescuable, though they’ll need to ripen from green on the window sill away from the infected plants.

• More progress has been made with the packing up. Our coffee table is now wrapped in cardboard for protection and in the first crate to be properly packed. The for sale list of everything we can think of at the moment that isn’t coming home will go out on Monday. 

• Having expected to have the best part of two months to catch up on emails (I have made good progress this week) and to make major progress on two major projects, a cloud has come up over the horizon. I wasn’t totally surprised when Doug Miles asked if I could cover for him while he’s on leave over Christmas and through January. I suspect my inbox will soon have lots of emails again, just when I was getting it under control.

I’ve been navigating MAF long enough to be able to see clouds like this coming up on the horizon. They don’t surprise me and I know I can navigate around them, but I still don’t have to particularly like doing so!

May you have a cloud free week, or if clouds do appear, may you safely and comfortably navigate your way around them.

December 9th

Time passes and Nicki and I are both acutely aware of it at the moment. Eleven weeks today and we leave PNG. Some mornings I wake up and wish it were over and we could go immediately. Other days, or even later the same day, the awareness of tempus fugit, time flies, makes me feel it is all happening far too fast.

All our crates are out under our house and ready to load. If I have time this afternoon I’ll start taking the first boxes full of belongings down to them. It certainly won’t be the final pack as there’s still too many things to decide whether they come home or not, and others that will be but which need boxing or wrapping, but it will be another move in the overall direction of departure.

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Dave & Karina Mills are staying here tonight on their way home to Australia for leave. Their second daughter, Ashleigh, is leaving with them to go to university, following behind their older daughter, Natasha, who is at medical school. Like when the boys were at Ukarumpa, we’ve seen these young people grow into adults and move into their own careers and lives. It’s wonderful to see, but at the same time, there’s a certain wistfulness due to time passing, which at the moment particularly fuels our own sense of tempus fugit.

The last time I wrote I said that last weekend we’d be in Kompiam with Dave & Karina. That happened as planned and on Wed Nov 28th we flew out from Hagen in the little Cessna 172. A short 20 minute flight in a tiny aeroplane save a 4½ hour drive over some not very good roads.

Originally Dave and I intended to walk from Kompiam to Lapalama on the Thursday, but the opportunity came up for us to be flown there instead in one of our Cessna Caravans. I was still in the later stages of a cold which had gone on to my chest (I’m still occasionally coughing a bit, but it’s virtually clear now) and didn’t feel 100%. A 4 hour walk when you’re not feeling great, versus a 5 minute flight. It wasn’t a difficult decision!

Admittedly the walk there is much more downhill, though that can be hard enough with the pounding it gives hips and knees, but when we walked back on Saturday I was immensely grateful I wasn’t in recovery from a walk in. More about that later.

The couple of days in Lapalama was quieter than expected with less fuss being made of our presence than promised. It turned out that we’d come in the middle of some intra-community and intra-church politics and power plays. The good thing was that it gave me some space to get over the cough. However, I hope that the politics are sorted out positively as one of the individuals primarily responsible for the airstrip being closed in 1995 is worming his way back into a position of authority in the community and church. While I got over the cough, Dave and a national doctor who’d come with us, ran some clinics in the local health centre.

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Pastor Nana is one of the Baptist pastors in Lapalama, and it was he who led the delegation to Kompiam back in 2009 to meet Dave and myself when Nicki and I were staying with them then. I estimate him to be much the same age as myself, possibly a year or two older.

On Saturday he walked to Kompiam with us, for most of the trek carrying my pack (about 8kg) with a rope of bananas on top (about another 6-7kg). While I hauled myself up steep slopes, reliant on a stick as a third leg, or using both hands in more precipitous places, he simply walked up making it look like an afternoon stroll. After a bit more than 4 hours of trekking we reached the new road that’s being cut between Kompiam and, eventually, Hagen. A Landcruiser from the hospital had come to meet us and after a 25 minute drive we were back; the drive has cut another 4 hours off the original trekking time.

While I collapsed, Ps Nana had a drink, did some shopping, was driven back to the head of the trail and walked back the same afternoon. The physical fitness, endurance and sure-footedness of highlands people never ceases to amaze me. When we walked out we met people with loads or children on their backs traversing the steep narrow trails, and pregnant women who seemed to think nothing of the exertion.

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In Kompiam we had a lovely couple of days with Dave & Karina. While Dave and I were away, Nicki had chatted with Karina about her offer to assist with Tok Pisin training for new MAF staff after we leave.

The local church gave us a lovely farewell on the Sunday, complete with a song sung by some young people especially for us, and in the afternoon we went for a swim in the local river accompanied by lots of local young people who climbed in the back of the Landcruiser for the short drive there and back.

The river was beautiful, refreshingly cool without being freezing and crystal clear with small fish in the shallows. A deep pool allowed the younger, braver people to jump off an overhanging rock. My best effort was to do a bomb off a lower rock, only to find the pool I jumped into wasn’t so deep. A bruise at the top of my rear end is still slightly tender – no jokes please about me being like a steam engine, it’s too old.

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Back to work on Monday, flying back to Hagen at about 10 a.m., after taking part in the school assembly. Karina runs the school and asked us to tell the children a bit about our time in PNG.
And back to work it was. There have been some major maintenance challenges this week, which I’ve not been primarily responsible for sorting out, but still needed to be aware of what was going on. And then on Thursday Brad Venter came to Hagen and it was a case of transfer of controls: “Handing over”; “Taking over”; words that pilots are very familiar with.

I spent slightly over half a day briefing Brad on various issues he needs to be familiar with. On Friday I did his recurrency training and checks so he can fly again. Tomorrow, Monday, he’ll have sent out an email saying to everybody that he is back in role as Flight Operations Manager. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the job, but after six years in post, it isn’t all that easy to walk away and leave it to somebody else. For the next couple of months I’ll provide whatever support Brad needs and hopefully finish some fairly major projects and tidy up other loose ends.

Tempus fugit.