Png’s Flying Doctor

The Beaver, the first to be registered in PNG, will be used to fly a doctor and support staff to the province’s outer islands to health clinics, antenatal clinics and family planning clinics, and provide medical support to PNG village aid stations and regional health centres.

“It is a flying doctor service not an emergency evacuation service,” Kirby explains.

“The village aid stations and health centres are the people who save lives, they are on duty 24/7 and our role is to provide support, training and upskilling. ” Health centres are manned by a nursing officer and each centre generally supports eight or nine village aid posts, each manned by a health orderly.

For the past 16 years Kirby has been working as an unpaid volunteer medical practitioner in MBP, seeking to prevent maternal deaths in a country that has one of the highest maternal death rates in the world.

(In 1990, working in PNG as a carpenter, Australian-born Kirby discovered a sick woman abandoned by the side of the road. He drove her to the nearest health centre and then returned the next morning to check on her welfare, only to find she had died overnight because she wasn’t attended to by a doctor. That led Kirby, at the age of 40, to study medicine at university so that he could work in PNG’s failing health system. ) Among the many major challenges Kirby faces is the very nature of the geography of Milne Bay – an archipelago community that sees the capital of Alotau (approximately 5,000 people and on the tip of the PNG mainland) surrounded by 600 islands on which the vast majority of MBP people live (some 200,000 people). Across the province, airstrips are few and far between and in many cases they are in a poor or unusable condition.

The Hands of Rescue Foundation is looking to help revitalise communities by fixing airstrips and having them open again for aircraft operation, enabling speedier access for medical services.

In recent months Kirby has worked closely with the Pumani village people who have now restored their airstrip. Work will continue one strip at a time.

Currently, it may take Kirby and his support team three to four weeks to do their rounds by boat. The Beaver will not only speed this delivery of clinical assistance and training but will enable the service to take an obstetrics-trained nurse to specific health centres when they are running their antenatal clinics. In a boat it is much harder to time visits to such clinics when they are running.

“The clinic is where you pick up medical problems and that has the potential to stop the need for emergency evacuations,” Kirby observed.

Why the Beaver? Kirby identifies that this operation has been a long time in the planning. At an early stage he took expert advice from experienced personnel familiar with Milne Bay and the Beaver was identified as a tough and reliable bush aircraft with a well-proven record for its ability to operate in rugged conditions.

In addition the Beaver was identified as an aircraft that would appeal to and attract the attention and support of the village men, which would help address men’s attitudes toward women during pregnancy, and their seeming lack of concern if things go wrong.

Under the aircraft’s cockpit door are the words ‘dokta bilong mama bel’, which translates in English to ‘Doctor who looks after mothers having a baby’.

The prediction is that the Beaver will generate interest among men and that they will get to know and welcome the support it provides.

Kirby’s Beaver (serial number 1479) originally saw service with the British Army Air Corps. After being declared surplus in 1987 it was imported into the US as N1215 and was operated in California, Alaska, Washington State and Minnesota.

Kirby, who first obtained his PPL back in 1980, picked up the Beaver in Minnesota and initially flew it to Ketchikan, Alaska for extensive flight training with a local high-time Beaver pilot. From there he ferried it to San Francisco where it was dismantled by Skyview and container-shipped to Performance Aero at Brisbane’s Archerfield Airport.

Performance Aero then re-assembled the Beaver and placed it on the PNG register.

Kirby is full of praise for the work done by both Skyview and Performance Aero, and for the support of Steve Krug of Sydney by Seaplane – “an excellent mentor who is passionate about caring for his aircraft”.

The Beaver will be based at Gurney Airport, approximately 15km from the provincial capital of Alotau and will operate as far as 250 miles from base. The aircraft has received a gross weight increase to 2,540kg, and has been fitted with long-range wingtip tanks, Wipline 6100 amphibious floats, STOL and wing angle change kits, and an HF radio.

The Beaver touched down at Gurney on September 9.

“The beautiful Beaver just did what it loves to do, flying on with that reassuring P&W gutsy rumble, it is such a satisfying, iconic aircraft to fly,” said Kirby.

Now at its new home, initially operations will be VFR to pontoons in sheltered bays near health centres and into airstrips as they are brought into use.

The Beaver will be supported by a wheeled Cessna 206, and as more airstrips are brought into service it’s expected that other wheeled aircraft will be obtained, such as the Pilatus Porter.

But it is equally expected that the Beaver – which features the Hands of Rescue Foundation logo featuring a Bird of Paradise with its wings protecting a mother and baby – will remain the aircraft that is fondly recognised as the face of the Hands of Rescue and DoctorBazza.

In the Province, airstrips are few and far between.