WE CAN FLY IN PNG!

Hello Friends!
It’s been a while since we last reported in. It has been a hectic few weeks with dramas a-plenty.

Sandy finally received his PNG licence yesterday after 6 weeks of pushing and prayer.
Special thanks to our friends in MAF South Africa who did some running around for us in speeding up the licensing process…..much appreciated guys!!!

As of Monday Sandy will begin operational flying with one of the instructor pilots. The check out phase in the highland areas will involve flying the routes between all the different major valleys 5 times, and the lowland routes will be covered 3 times each. Any new airstrips will involve briefings before going into them and a number of landings at each of the more difficult airstrips. Once the routes have been covered the required number of times Sandy will be let loose to fly on his own.

Up to this point, Sandy has been flying with another pilot observing and doing the flying when the plane is empty (he had a student licence that restricted him to flying cargo).

He spent two nights out at the MAF base at a town called Goroka this week. Along with moving general commuters, Sandy went and helped pick up a local Pastor and his family from an outlying village where they had been doing church work, and brought them back to their home in Goroka. They also moved coffee for a church community, to be sold in a bigger town.

At one village airstrip a man came up to Sandy and introduced himself as the local school teacher, who a month ago was flown out by MAF on a medi-vac. The teacher was critically ill with malaria and pneumonia, and was unconscious when our pilots picked him up. He came and thanked the pilots for their help, and said he was feeling much better now and that he was glad that they had been there to take him to hospital.

It is exciting to be a part of a work that is making a real difference in the lives of the people of PNG.