Gear Incident at Maun

I mentioned that there had been an incident in the same type of plane that I was flying a week or so before my own landing gear problems. I've found the story buried in a few places, most of them non-english websites. The local newspaper, The Ngami Times, was the only english one I found...unfortunately their website is a bit of a mess. If you go here, though, you should be able to read the story. Or you can go here and scroll down to find the story and some sharper pictures. The headline was "LEATHERMAN SAVES PILOTS."

Maun Medical

It has been a long time since I’ve done much night flying because pretty much all of the Maun flying is daytime VFR stuff, so it was a bit unusual for me to find myself winging across the country in the dark last week. Both of our King Airs in Gaborone were down for maintenance (one for a scheduled inspection and the other with overheating engine troubles) and two hospitals called Flying Mission with patients for medical flights on the same day. Since the only other option available in Botswana or South Africa was a prohibitively expensive Hawker jet, Mark called me up in Maun and asked if I could do the flights in the Cessna 210 that I had flown down from Zambia just a few days before. The call from Mark came in the early afternoon and the two flights would be a total of over 6 hours of flying so I found myself doing the last two legs of the day at night.
I was reminded again how much I enjoy night flying. There are few things more peaceful and settling to me than cruising in glass-smooth, cool night air under the bright shine of a full moon. The radio is quiet, with only the occasional overnight flight from Johannesburg to Europe breaking the silence on the airwaves. Even in the bright moonlight, a few of the brighter stars manage to push their way through. The luminescent white expanse of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans dominates the landscape for almost a third of the 1.5 hour trip home to Maun from Francistown. The feeling of solitude is strengthened by the knowledge that I am passing over a vast expanse of land virtually devoid of human habitation, save for the odd scattered cattle post (and not even that over the massive salt pans)…and this isolation feeds the only distraction from my sense of peace: the knowledge that I’m counting on one (fallible) piece of engineering to keep me aloft above this dry, desolate expanse. At night, my normal scan of the engine instruments becomes almost obsessive and borders on the paranoid. I reassure myself (half-successfully) by remembering that I know this stretch of desert intimately (I fly directly over Jack’s Camp, so the last half of the route is the same route that I fly from Maun to Jack’s an average of at least once a day). I know exactly where the nearest road is (there is only one paved road in the area after all), where the nearest groups of people are located, where the suitable landing strips are, where the trees start to take over the grassland and make any emergency landings more painful…and on top of that, the full moon would enable me to easily find and land on any of the airstrips on the route. So even my paranoia doesn’t detract too much from the experience.
The beauty and serenity of the flight was kept intact up until the very last minutes, when I innocently selected the gear down and patiently waited for the landing gear to extend and lock in the down position. And waited. And waited. And finally, after some long seconds, grudgingly came to the uncomfortable conclusion that the hydraulic pump meant to pump down the gear was not pumping. This conclusion was made even more uncomfortable by the memory of an incident that had occurred with this same type of airplane at Maun just a few days ago, in which the landing gear didn’t come down (it was an amazing story, actually, which you can read about here and here and here). I told the tower about my problem and asked to circle to the east of the field while I tried to take care of the problem. Cycling the gear selector did nothing, and all circuit breakers were in, so I pumped the gear down using the manual hand pump provided for exactly this situation, and the gear came down just fine. I then made a normal landing and headed for home, relieved that nothing more complicated came of the incident and relieved to finally be heading for bed (by this time it was 9:59 pm…I landed just before the airport closing time of 10). A long, but worthwhile, day. It feels good to be available to help out on flights like those, providing valuable access to needed medical care and even helping to save lives sometimes.

Friends of all kinds

In the last few weeks, I’ve enjoyed a significant infusion of new friends in my life. So, without further ado:

Koko (or the phonetically-equivalent “Cocoa” for the English-inclined) joined me on my flight from Gaborone back to Maun after my week of doing maintenance on the airplane in South Africa, and is a now a permanent resident of my Maun house. Debbie found her abandoned along the roadside near the female short-termers house in Gaborone, and since Nicola and Debbie are both leaving in a few weeks they needed to find a home for her. She now enjoys a reign of terror in my house, where she eats ravenously and indiscriminately, fearlessly climbs any and all panted legs, and will stalk and attack any moving object with abandon. She also does her best to chew off any proffered fingers.

Christoph is a much more transient visitor. Hailing from Germany, he spent a year working with Flying Mission as a short-termer about 3 years ago, and is just coming back to spend a few months here helping out where he can. He has been working with Baptist missionaries here in Maun, and I have greatly enjoyed spending time with Christoph and getting to know him. One of the highlights: Christoph found a neighbor of his that has a boat and convinced him to let us rent it for the day. The catch…it didn’t come with a motor. So we spent the day learning how to pole up and down the river, with varying degrees of success. It was hard work and lots of fun, but I unfortunately forgot to take my camera along.

The new Flying Mission couple has also arrived in Maun, as mentioned before. Here Julie enjoys a nap with Koko in one of her quieter moments. The Browns are staying with me in my house until about the second week of September, when they plan on moving into a house of their own. They’ve already signed the lease and it looks like things are falling into place for that arrangement. They are a very warm-hearted couple and it has been a lot of fun living with them and getting to know them in the last week or two.

The Maun flight department in its entirety. Unfortunately, right now Colin isn’t able to do any flying on his own because our only aircraft at the moment is registered in South Africa and Colin only has his Botswana license. Flying Mission is working on getting a Bots-registered airplane down from our department in Zambia for him to fly, so hopefully that will all come together in the next weeks. It will be a great help to have Colin flying as well and giving me a bit of a break from time to time. I’m looking forward to working here more as a team rather than all on my own, so it’s exciting to finally have the Browns with me.

Finally (lest this post get too long for you to suffer through), our gardener brought his family along one evening last week and we invited them in for dinner. Lesh, his wife Gaone, and their child Warona, came in and enjoyed some food and conversation before heading back home for the night. During the day, Lesh is a maintenance worker at Love Botswana, a large church/school complex just down the road from us.

Alright, that’s it for the new friends of the moment. More to come later.

First of all, I must apologize for my abysmal blogging record of late. It’s been partly due to being very busy, partly due to laziness, and largely influenced by the lack of new and different things that have been happening of late.

At the moment I’m coming to the end of a long weekend spent in South Africa at Mercy Air once again, having an inspection done on the airplane. The goal was to have the inspection finished within two days, but unfortunately we fell just a few hours short of that goal on Saturday evening meaning that we had to wait until today (Monday) to finish up the last bits of work. It was okay for me though, because I was very happy to have Sunday off after a long week of flying and then working on the airplane. The last month’s schedule has been for the most part a continuous loop of 7 days of flying with one day off in between, which gets pretty tiring after a while. In that month, I’ve flown about 95 hours, which is just short of the maximum of 100 hours per month allowable by law in Botswana. So needless to say I’ve been pretty busy.

The other big news is that a new Flying Mission couple has moved up to Maun to join me. Colin and Julie Brown have lived in Alaska (where Colin had his own flying business and Julie was an elementary teacher) for the past 30 years and are making a major transition I their lives by coming to Botswana. They were staying with me in my house for a few days before I left to come down here, and they will be living with me until they find a place of their own to settle in to. More about them later, but now I need to run along and help finish up the work on the airplane. And then back to the grind.

Sunrises and things

It’s been business as usual in Maun for the last week or so. The aircraft finally got out of the maintenance and paperwork muddle that it had been mired in down south, and last Thursday I airlined down to Johannesburg to pick it up and bring it back to Maun. Since then, we’ve been quite busy and I think I’ve had more than my share of early morning flights. The other day I had to leave before sunrise to pick up some passengers at a small airstrip near Maun (the directors of Flying Mission and some of their family, incidentally) and found myself grumpily flying along, after rebelling against my alarm clock a bit too long and then rushing through breakfast to leave in time for the flight. It was a beautiful morning, though, (as is every winter morning here, without fail) and as I watched the sun peak up over the green waterways of the delta from 500 ft I couldn’t stop a wide grin from spreading across my face and sticking there. And I was once again reminded how lucky I am to be in this place. But I know that it’s not just this place – you can find moments of beauty like that one wherever you are, provided you look for them. I often find myself forgetting that and becoming so used to a place that I don’t remember to look for beauty or newness anymore, and that’s a trap that I want to keep myself from falling into. Life is so much richer if you take time to appreciate it.

Windhoek in Review

The last week has been fantastic. As I said in my last post, I got to do a charter trip for my dad’s company. So I flew his passengers on our Flying Mission King Air into and out of a camp in Namibia and one in Botswana, with him riding along as copilot on those trips. Some highlights from the week:

• Scrambling to get everything ready for dad’s arrival because of a last-minute change of their arrival airport in Windhoek
• Flying over the immense stretch of sand dunes in the Sossousvlei area of Namibia, near the camp to which I flew the passengers
• Extremely hurried day road trip from Windhoek to the sand dunes
• Being able to tell my dad what to do because he was the copilot
• Riding jumpseat in the Gulfstream V my dad flies on a 10-min repositioning flight
• Two-day trip to Moremi National Park with dad and another pilot from his company
• Seeing hundreds of vultures and a massive male lion feasting on a kudu kill

The worst part of the week was undoubtedly watching the last few minutes of the European Cup Soccer final with increasing despair as my team (Germany) lost.

Now that the week is over, however, it’s soon back to business as usual in Maun. For the moment, I’m in Gaborone waiting for our Maun airplane to finish an inspection in South Africa. I don’t really have any idea how long I will be here…probably anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. I’m not complaining, though, because being here gives me a chance to spend some more time with my friends here (some of whom are leaving very soon) and also may give me a chance to do some more King Air flying. I’ll enjoy it while I’m here, anyway.

Windhoek

In a few short hours, I'm off to Windhoek, the capital city of Namibia. If all goes well, once I get to Windhoek, I'll see my father once again (for the fourth time in the year that I'm here!). This time, though, it's business for both of us. My dad is a corporate pilot in the US, and it just so happens that he's bringing some passengers over to Southern Africa, where they'll stay at safari camps in Namibia and Botswana. However, since the aircraft that he flies is too large to go into the dirt airstrips that service the camps, he arranged for his company to contract with Flying Mission to take his passengers from the main airports to the camps. So I will fly up to Namibia, meet him and his passengers, and fly them from Windhoek to their camp where we will drop them for a few nights. I'll then take the passengers from the camp back to Windhoek, where they'll jump on my dad's plane and fly to Maun. I'll then meet them in Maun and fly them from Maun to a camp in the delta for a few nights and afterwards pick them up again. It's pretty exciting to be able to do this flight, not least because dad will be riding along as a second pilot on the flights in Namibia. So it will be the first time that I'll be captain with my dad as my first officer! Nice, huh? The trip will be in the King Air, which is also fun and will be a nice change from the small Cessna that I have been flying for the last few months in Maun. After this trip though (which ends on July 4th) it will be back to business as usual in Maun. I'm hoping that I'll soon have internet at my house there and will be able to update this site more regularly, although it has been a terribly long and somewhat painful process trying to get that set up. We shall see what time brings.

A Word on the Delta

While the average rainfall of Botswana is generally higher than most definitions of a “desert” require, most of the country is extremely arid and desert-like. This is partially due to the irregularity of the rainfall and to extremely high evaporation rates (almost 6 feet over the course of a year from standing water!). Nowhere in Botswana does annual rainfall exceed the rate of evaporation, so bodies of water are extremely rare and the only permanent ones (other than man-made reservoirs) are the Chobe river along the northern border and the Okavango Delta in the northwest. This makes the delta an amazing and unique area. It is the world’s largest inland delta, dumping the waters collected by the Okavango River in Angola into the deep, dry sands of the Kalahari region and creating a massive green oasis of winding channels and lagoons in the midst of an extremely harsh, arid environment. This contrast is very striking, and can be seen quite starkly in pictures from space. As a permanent source of water, the delta sustains huge amounts of wildlife and birdlife and is one of the jewels of Africa.

At regular intervals as I fly around this area of the country, I am struck with awe at the beauty and diversity of the life and environment around me. And I’m deeply appreciative that I get to experience this place in such an intimate way. In any one flight over the delta, I invariably see elephants (often in large herds), lechwe (reddish antelope that are well-adapted to life in the water), zebra, and giraffe, with the occasional massive herd of buffalo. The birdlife is equally diverse and beautiful (although also slightly more threatening to the safety of flight). This area of the country is one best places in Africa (and probably in the world) to see such an amazing diversity of wildlife and habitat in the midst of vast areas of (relatively) unspoiled wilderness. I count myself blessed to be here.

The Okavango Delta from space (the fan-shaped area just left of center).