Quick Update

In a few hours, I will be heading for the airport for my first flight in the King Air, which I’m very excited about. I’ll be going along on a charter flight with Dan Shenk, one of the other pilots. We’ll be going to Francistown to pick up some passengers and then heading up to Kasane to drop them off before coming home for the night. This flight is to be the beginning of my orientation to airports and navigation in Botswana, and then Tomorrow (Monday) I will be doing a training flight in the King Air and then taking my checkride (a flight test) in the afternoon to get my Botswana pilot’s license. After that, I just have to play the waiting game and hope the paperwork goes through quickly. With any luck, though, I’ll be ready to fly for real within the next couple of weeks. It can’t come too soon as far as I’m concerned. While waiting for all my training to get lined up and finished (Tim, the chief pilot, has been gone a lot of the last two weeks on trips and that has slowed my training down), I’ve been helping out with the sudden rush of work that’s come into the maintenance side of things recently. I performed an inspection on one airplane and helped Walt out with a big project that he’s working on. It’s been fun to get my hands dirty and feel like I’m actually helping out rather than just sitting around and waiting to start flying. As far as being able to fly, I have come at just about the perfect time. Flying Mission is in a bit of a crunch for pilots right now, since with the recent departure of Jeff and Micelle Royce we are down to four pilots for two aircraft until I come on line. And since one of those pilots is the Ops Manager and one is the Chief Pilot, they have too many administrative duties to be considered full-time pilots. In addition, we just got news this past week that Flying Mission won a contract with the Ministry of Health for air ambulance flights for the next 2 (extendable to 3) years, which will give us a steady source of flying for a while. So, needless to say, they have been pushing to get my training done ASAP and relieve some of the pressure. Anyway, that’s a quick update on the flight side of things here. Hope that everything is going well for all of you back home. Keep in touch. Love,

Travis