Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits

Cursing the adolescent motivations that led him to become a pilot, he arranged his neurones in some semblance of order to drag himself out of bed and go through the morning rituals. The drive to work had been accomplished in this sort of weather since the beginning of the week, so he knew where most of the potholes were lying under the torrents of water that flowed from one street to the next; the town’s drainage system having given up its fight against nature very early in the season. A few new potholes lurked beneath the swirling waters on which to test his suspension though. His right hand had to work overtime in its capacity as manual demister to preclude the windscreen from fogging over. “Who in his right mind would want to fly today?”

Siwea which lay to the north wasn’t the nicest of places to go to at the best of times, this weather made it even less inviting. It would probably be another case of being VFR between layers again. He felt that at this rate someone was going to cop it, although up till now the guys had been fairly lucky. There had only been six bad prangs over the last eight months, a couple of missionary pilots and the balance being the ‘opposition’ out of Mt. Hagen and Madang. Not bad really, considering DCA would send them an annual ‘personal’ Notam depicting their survivability rate as negligible. Heartening news indeed to most of the young pilots who were trying to gain hours so as to be eligible for the Australian airlines.

The Huon Air crew room seemed a cheerier haven from the outside elements, due mainly to the steam which rose off the urn, promising strong coffee in the offing. The other pilots milled about bemoaning the weather, nursing stale minds, phoning out flight plans to Nadzab FSU and glancing at the mandatory notes to check the closure of strips within their areas of operation. Hopefully Siwea would be closed due soft, wet surface, but then again the Strip Reporting Agent was in the opposition’s camp. His ploy was to open it to Melair, so they could take all the available passengers but close it before Houn Air could gain the circuit!

Outside the hangar, the scene was one of depressed misery. It was raining lightly now which was of small value to the many groups of native passengers and well wishers who gathered about the precincts of the building in sullen groups, taking whatever shelter they could find; sitting on anything from billum bags to a stack of galvanised sheeting and other such miscellaneous cargo. Some silently puffed on cigarettes, made from cheap tobacco rolled in two inch square old newspaper or chewed their betel nut, like a cow its cud. Here and there greetings were exchanged and the needle-like glows of torches waved in the darkness as pilots of the two Companies checked their respective steeds for the day. A dull bellow of outrage punctuated the still air as one unfortunate discovered that the native loaders had given him a double load of sugar bales to carry. Language of a more erudite nature was used a short time later as a Melair pilot found his Britten Norman Islander had been filled with Avtur and not Avgas.

As happened with monotonous regularity, his aircraft always seemed to be parked in the biggest puddle on the hardstand. Luckily, the new stockman’s boots kept most of the water out, it was always discouraging to start the day with soggy feet. The Cessna 206 squatted on its balloon low-pressure tyres with 400kg of rice and sugar in its passenger compartment and cargo pod. She appeared to check out and even contrived to look purposeful, considering she resembled a pregnant guppy, sitting very much tail down: The fail safe ceremony of ordering a cargo boy onto the tailplane for a CofG check was performed. The nose rose as the aircraft drunkenly tottered fore and aft on its main undercarriage legs. Just before the tail touched the ground, the native jumped clear; as if not too positive about what it should be doing when the nose wheel eased back to earth. “Not too good, but then, better than yesterday’s effort” he thought as he made his way back to the crew room for a final shot of coffee.

“Charlie Oscar Foxtrot, Airways clearance; orbit Lae on climb not above niner thousand, when ready leave controlled airspace on track Landslide Gap. ” “For your information, Sierra Echo Alpha reports weather between Lae and Landslide Gap No. 2, Kabwum and Mongi Valleys is fine and beaut, call Nadzab Tower ops normal at time one five. ”

SEA was an old turbo porter; the driver of which was Eric, a colourful character to say the least. The only directional instrument he had was a compass, the ADF never appeared to work, yet he could get into the hills and back under some of the worst weather conditions. In Lae on such a day as this, his major charity was to ‘test’ the conditions and send reports back. To preclude Flight Service from ascertaining that the weather was considerably less than legal VMC Eric’s reports were coded one, two and three. Number one was fine, number two was for experienced pilots only and number three meant weather hopeless, stay at Lae. Number three was only used if the destination valley itself was ‘socked in’ and none of the airstrips could be found and attempted.

Today it was number two, which seemed that the only problem was in getting out of Lae and missing the seven to thirteen-thousand-foot peaks, which guarded the Markham Valley. The morning itself was turning a lighter shade of grey, although with the scene it was revealing of the airport and its neighbouring industrial come wharf area, it would have been better had it still been dark. Low scud was drifting in aimless patches through the canopy of the jungle as he firewalled the throttle and conned the fully laden 206 into the air, climbing to meet the 800′ cloud base, continually searching· for holes.

An Islander would have been better, he could have gone out to the base ofthe hills and started looking for gaps in the cloud there. · The extra power that a second engine afforded enabled one to go through smaller holes and cheat a little (or a lot) by becoming IFR on the edges prior to breaking into the gap between it and the next higher layer. With the Cessna 206, especially as fat as it was with load, the hole had to be large enough to place the aircraft in and circle, rather akin to a goldfish swimming the perimeters of its bowl. He thus staggered upwards, maintaining position over Lae when he could sight it through cloud breaks or by lining up between two ridges on either side of the valley.

The performance itself was that of an old metho drinker, trying to climb the stairs of a lighthouse. The grey was slowly left below as the layers became thinner allowing the sun’s rays to penetrate and add cheer to the scene. The radio kept up an incessant chatter as clearances were relayed and acknowledged, opinions as to tracking and beating the weather were exchanged and various pilots kept a commentary on their relative positions in the vain hope that collisions would be avoided as about twelve aircraft stooged around in various layers of six eighths murk, like ants in a nest, all trying to find a way out of the top.

Breaking into yet another large chamber of clear air at seven thousand feet, he could see out to the north east the craggy ridges of his major en route reporting point and landmark, the Landslide Gap. Breathing a sigh of relief that up to this stage he had hit neither aircraft nor hill, he lowered the 206’s riose and allowed it to sluggishly gather speed. Close to all up weight and at this density altitude the aircraft’s performance in cruise wasn’t about to set the world on fire. He reflected that the aircraft in Lae never seemed to be flown but rather to be forcibly dragged through some of the worst weather and airstrips New Guinea had to offer. Operating, for example, over the past week was conspicuous by a four foot wide creek running down the centre of its red clay surface, which at times threatened to wash the strip off the ridge to which it so tenaciously clung. The place would eventually be closed due soft, wet surface, for aircraft would end up bogging or cutting the strip up with their tyres. The shallow water course could only be considered a minor hazard.

His daydreaming was interrupted by a Melair Baron pulling alongside with its flaps and undercarriage out, so as to match the 206’s meagre 11Skts. The pilot was Ian, whose notoriety stemmed from the fact that whenever he was overnighting at a coastal airstrip, he always managed to fit his surfboard into the aircraft. This was usually accomplished at great inconvenience to the paying native passengers.

The twin-engined Beechcraft Baron had a good sixty knots over the Cessna and Ian was revelling in its superiority. He wore a grin from ear to ear and was aggressively punctuating the air in the Cessna’s direction with two fingers. For the next few minutes, he danced with the aircraft swinging underneath it from side to side. Occasionally, for effect he’d reverse direction and bank up over the top, making a great show of throttling backwards and forwards and raising and lowering the undercarriage. The demonstration all the while to show off the Baron’s power and speed . . . “Rata Tata Tata Tata” blasted through the earphones of both pilots, as first the shadow and thence the form of Houn Airs only Baron swept past at full bent. In the relative silence of the ensuing seconds, all that could be seen was Ian’s jaw slowly closing to shut and then a prompt flurry of hands as he brought in his flaps, gear and fire walled his throttles, leaning forward over the controls like a jockey, as he urged his beast on in hot pursuit of the irreligious offender.

With the tension of clearing the weather around Lae some what alleviated by the antics of his fellow pilots, the next ten minutes seemed uneventful as the Cessna plodded on over the broken ranges and jumble of minor ,valleys, which loosely culminated in the headwaters of the Mongi river. The final ridge on the journey was breasted and Siwea hove into view as the aircraft nosed into a shallow descent to six thousand feet, which was circuit height.

From the air Siwea never looked terribly inspiring, a dismal timber village existing five thousand feet above an angry coastline with a five hundred metre red clay strip, the surface of which was held together in a lethargic fashion by tendrils of kikuyu grass. One felt as if one was landing up a dead-end alley. For at least two thirds of its length, Siwea’s sides rose to terminate in a thirty foot high embankment, giving the impression that it had actually been dug down into the ridge. The major problem was that from about mid finals a go-around was impossible. During the overfly, one looked for the amount of water on the middle of the strip; the wind sock and the pigs and dogs, who religiously wandered the landing area’s environs whenever an aircraft started its approach. Siwea’s threshold initially ran uphill before flattening off. The rise was so pronounced that from the parking bay adjacent to the strip’s centre, it was impossible to see an aircraft on short final. Even after heavy rain this first stage would stay fairly dry due to the water run off that its slope provided; it was thus the best area for braking.

The technique employed was that of a long, slow, flat approach placing the aircraft somewhere near the top of its power curve on very short final. In this manner, it could be coaxed to land as close to the beginning of the strip as one dared (if one fell short, the risk was run of ripping the gear off on the cliff’s edge). The landing attitude was thus established on mid final and held with judicious amounts of power to touchdown. Maximum braking was effected on the initial uphill segment and if an error of judgement was made, so as to take the aircraft past the parking bay with no appreciable reduction in speed, then some form of ground loop had to be executed so that the tail and not the front of the aircraft hit the cliff face at the strip’s end.

Siewa was also considered to be an early morning strip. From about 9. 00am on a breeze would start strengthening and the orographic cloud for which Papua New Guinea is so characterized would engulf the area. Any sort of wind here was bad news, for as it was only a ‘one-way’ strip, a headwind in one direction necessarily gave a tail wind in the other. Perhaps the worst was a headwind on landing, for once at the threshold the air curved over the ridge face as it followed the earth’s form in its descent to the main valley floor, two thousand feet below. It was much like running into the top of a waterfall and not being able to swim upstream. If one was ‘game’ enough to land under these conditions a great deal of height and power had to be kept in reserve. Landing with a tailwind wasn’t too bad, for if one aimed to touch down short (ie. aim a few feet below the cliff top) the aircraft would get a kick in the tail as it was lifted over the threshold, as the air mass rose to run over the ridge.

Whatever the conditions though, there wasn’t a great deal of room for error! The best wind indicators were the breakfast fires the natives lit. The windsock (an old pillow case) was virtually useless for as it was wet most of the time it wouldn’t move until at least an eight-knot breeze blew and that was considered an abort situation.

The psyching game was well underway as the Cessna entered downwind. He cancelled his smartwatch in the air. This was considered by many to be foolish, but to him was part of positive thinking. He was going to make it, he wasn’t going to prang. Besides, he felt that if he did foul up on the ridge, he’d be beyond help anyway. As final was turned everything seemed about right, all the flap was out, check completed and he was in the ‘slot’ abeam a separate rock face at 5,900 feet, the cue for his run in.

The threshold filled his vision as it drew nearer – “A bit more power. . . nose up a little. . . whoops, too high! Check the speed. . .

Crikey! There’s a headwind! Where did that come from? Aim in a little, level the wings. . . Steady her, more power! Will I make it? NO!. . . Yes, should be okay. . . Too late now; get in first you idiot, then think about stopping later concentrate. There’s the threshold, cut the power; back with the stick. Whew, made it! Brake. . . oops, more on the right. Heck, its slippery. Stop in time? There’s the parking bay yeah, no worries. Oblivious to the sounds around him and that the aircraft was covered in mud sprayed up by its landing roll, he headed for the parking bay and shut down. It always took a few seconds to regain his composure and steady his knees before alighting. After being in and out of here so often, he’d have thought he would be used to it by now. Almost immediately the aircraft was swamped by the chatter- Ing villagers, as they inspected the cargo and passengers. As the unloading began, he walked to the edge of the parking bay and looked out over the sea. It was going to be a good day. The sun was getting higher in the east, chasing the, damp morning chill from the airstrip. From this perch he had panoramic views of the jungle below, now glistening a deep green, as the valley stretched to meet the waters of the Vitiaz Strait which appeared to be alive as it danced fresh and blue in the strengthening sunlight. Visibility was so good, the old volcanic cone on Umboi Island some thirty miles away could be seen. The knot in his stomach relaxed, as he recognised that the worst part of the day was over, he’d survived this, so the rest couldn’t be too bad. Lae would be getting better by now and the rest of the airstrips on the Peninsula would be drying out. . .

That application form had been sent off, all neatly filled out about three weeks back. They even wanted his photo with it. “Hell”, he thought. “I wonder if I will ever get an interview with an Australian airline”.