Life in PNG is a new page we’ve decided to make in order to provide you with a little glimpse into our lives here in PNG. We’ll be adding new sections just to let you have a little sneak peak into what life looks like here; how it differs from life in the good old USA, and some things that are the same.
Glimpse #2: Paul’s job continued...
We heard the words “be flexible” many times in our training before we came to PNG, and we heard many stories of how people are commonly asked to fill in for positions that they hadn’t planned on. That conversation normally continues to where they find out that I’m in Aviation, and say, “well, that’s not as common with Aviation, because you guys are so specialized!”
Well, when we’d been here in Ukarumpa for almost three months, and I got asked to make my first job change! I’ve been asked to fill in for the helicopter flight coordinator. The person who is supposed to fill this position is stuck in the US for a short time working on renewing Visa’s, and should be returning in the next couple months.
The helicopter flight coordinator’s job is to take flight requests from translators and other missions and fit them together into a daily flight schedule. This is quite a challenge to make the best use of the helicopter. The cost of a helicopter is 3 or 4 times the cost of flying an airplane, so we do our best to make the best of all the flight time.
It’s common for a helicopter to go a couple hours away from our base, and then have airplanes bring additional cargo behind it, meet it at a close by airport, and allow the helicopter to make the short shuttle into the village. This can be very confusing getting all the airplanes and helicopters to the correct position with the correct loading at the correct time.
A couple weeks ago, we sent a helicopter to pick up one translator couple, and drop them in another village that was about 3 miles away. I thought this was a strange request, but then we had that couple over for dinner shortly after they returned and they explained it. Their two villages that they work in are 3 miles apart, but there is a 4,000 ft. valley between the two. It is an 8 hour walk to get from one village to the other. In the helicopter, this was a 2 minute flight!
I am enjoying this new challenge. I’ve learned a lot, and got to meet a lot of the translators, which is fun. I’ve gotten to know the country a lot better as well. However, I will be excited when my replacement comes and I can go back to doing what I do best.
Read below to find out what I THOUGHT my job would be!!.. and what it will be again soon.
Glimpse #1: Paul’s job.
SIL aviation provides transportation to our missionaries. Most of the village allocations where translators work are either inaccessible by road, or the roads are so bad that Aviation makes their lives a lot easier. The other day I heard the helicopter fly over early in the morning (not so abnormal). But then I heard it again about 20 minutes later. So when I got to work, I asked where it went. The pilot explained that this specific lady has a 7 minute helicopter ride to her village. You can get there by motorcycle in 4 hours, and sometimes can even get a car in (“car” in this country means a 4 wheel drive pickup truck, “truck” means a small flatbed that 30 people can cram onto the back of). The short helicopter ride is so valuable in saving her time and effort.
Papua New Guinea Aviation regulations are very similar to Australian regulations, and therefore my US maintenance licenses are not acceptable here. I can get them transferred, but I have to do a lot of paperwork, and pass a series of tests in order to gain my PNG licenses. I have all the experience necessary to transfer my license, which is a major hurtle that many people have to work on, but it will still take about a year for me to get everything done to gain my PNG license.
But don’t despair!!! They put me to work the moment I got near an airplane. I am allowed to work as much as I want, I just have to have a licensed person check my work and sign for it.
Therefore, it seems that that the easiest place for them to put me to work is on the major inspections. Every three years, our airplanes must be fully taken apart, and then inspected in more depth than the normal scheduled maintenance. All four of our Cessna 206’s will need major inspections this year, so I plan on spending a lot of this year working on those projects.
As you can see from the picture, we really tear these planes apart. This one that we are currently working on is getting some extra work done this time. The wing attach fittings had to have a special inspection due to the age of the aircraft, therefore we had to pull the wings off. We also installed new seats, and a new seat rail system, which took two of us two weeks just to install the new rails. It also got an overhauled engine. We hope to have this airplane flying by mid February.
