The first medical flying....

Well, this last week has been an eventful one. My Botswanan license was approved by the DCA and issued. Naturally, it was issued as a Commercial Pilot's license and not an Airline Transport Pilot's license so it had to be sent back and reprinted but in any case I got my first taste of flying the line here in Botswana. On Tuesday morning we got a call from the Maun hospital. They had a patient with a ruptured appendix that needed to be transported to the Francistown hospital. I headed out to the aircraft to pull the covers and do the preflight inspection while the other pilot filed the flight plans and got our paperwork ready. At the same time the flight coordinater was calling the paramedics and arranging ambulance transport on both ends. As soon as the paramedics arrived we closed the doors, started the engines, and blasted off towards Maun. Maun is roughly an hour and a half away so once we were in the air, the paramedics promptly fell asleep and we settled in for the flight. On arrival in Maun, the ambulance was waiting with a surprise...a second patient! I never caught exactly what was wrong with the second guy but in the end we were only able to take the appendix case since we only have room for one stretcher on board. (There was discussion of us going back for the second patient once we had dropped the first off in Francistown but the Maun hospital eventually decided he wasn't critical enough to justify another trip.) So, from there we flew to Francistown and dropped off patient #1. The paramedics needed to accompany the patient to the hospital so Dan (the other pilot) and I fueled the aircraft and then wandered over to the tiny terminal to see if there was any food to be had. We got the very last of what the lunch lady had left...beef, rice, beets, and coleslaw. Quite a meal for 15pula (about $2.25). Dan got his food first and headed back to the aircraft to eat while I waited a few minutes for mine. Finally, I got my food and headed back to the aircraft to enjoy. When I got there, Dan eyed my styrofoam container and asked, "Is that still hot?" I replied that it was and he said with a smile "Then you better hurry up and eat it. The fat coagulates when it gets cool." I snapped open my lid and satisfied that it hadn't coagulated yet ate a very tasty if not a little greasy meal. About the time I was finishing my last forkfuls the ambulance reappeared with the paramedics who looked a little annoyed that we had gotten food and they had not. However, even if the lunch lady had had more food we didn't have time to wait. The paramedics informed us that there was a patient in Gaborone that needed transport to Johannesburg. So, we fired up and head back to Gaborone. On arrival there, we called for fuel while we went to the terminal to clear customs. By the time we returned, the aircraft had been fueled and the paramedics were loading the patient, a South African motocross racer who had badly broken a leg in a race in Botswana. As soon as he was loaded, we were off again...this time to the Lanseria airport in the Johannesburg area. I found that flying into South Africa wasn't very hard until it came to the mountains of paperwork. On arrival in Lanseria, we headed into Customs and Immigration. Both Customs and Immigration had a fairly substantial form that had to be filled out in duplicate for both entry and exit. (Someone should tell them about carbon paper!) In any case, with the paperwork finished and the patient safely in his ambulance and on his way to a South African hospital we were able to turn around and head home. It had been a very long but enlightening day.

And now we wait....again....

Well, the word right now is that I will have my Botswanan licenses on Monday. Hopefully, I will be able to get my airport badges at the same time. Once those pieces are in place I will be able to start earning my keep here. However, even once I get my licenses I still will not be able to fly as a captain here until I am able to complete an instrument flying check. In order to complete that check I have to fly an ILS approach (instrument landing system) and as it happens the only ILS in the whole country is out of service at least until the middle of this coming week. Oh well, things have still come together for me much faster than people have expected anyway so I am still a little ahead of the curve. In any case, I can fly as a first officer once I get the licenses and what I really need at this point isn't so much practice flying the airplane as it is practice with the air traffic controllers (who are very hard to understand) and work within the ATC system here. So, left seat...right seat...it doesn't really matter. I'll still be gaining that experience. Hopefully, this next week will bring stories of my first air ambulance flying in Africa! We'll see.

When it rains it pours....

"Elephants, two o'clock!" I called out. Tim said "Are you sure? Oh yeah...there they are." Then he simultaneously rolled the aircraft sharply to the right and yelled over his shoulder "Elephants!!", while indicating the right side of the airplane. Our passengers crowded the right side windows while we swept over the pair of giant animals at a mere 500ft and 160 knots. The bull flapped his ears and whirled to face us as the cow fled into the bush and then we were gone. On Monday afternoon Tim had asked if I would like to accompany him on a charter in the morning. I am not yet formally licensed here so it was to be a trip more for my own orientation than for me to serve as a meaningful crewmember but being anxious to see how things really work here I naturally accepted. The trip in our King Air was chartered by an oil and gas company that had recently leased some huge tracts of land from the government for exploration and wanted to get a feel for the immense size of their holdings. We met at the airport at 5:30am and waited for the clients who finally showed up around 6:45am. Then we flew a normal leg from Gaborone to Maun where we landed for fuel. Upon taking off from Maun we leveled at 500 ft above the ground and flew northeast towards Kasane, then when we reached the boundary of Chobe National Park we turned and flew towards the massive salt flats of Nie Pans. After reaching the salt flats we wheeled again to the northeast and flew directly to the Zimbabwean border where we turned and flew southwest along the border. When we reach the small village of Nata we flew an additional 45km to a remote station where the gas company was doing exploratory drilling and did a few low level turns around their small drill rig and crew. Then we climbed out to a more reasonable cruise altitude and flew to Francistown for fuel and then on to Gaborone. All in all we flew for just over 6 hours, a full half of which was a mere 500ft above the ground. It was an incredible experience for someone new to the country and I got a feel for the massive uninhabited spaces that exist in here. We flew for hundreds of miles over mmopane forest and savanna seeing nothing but elephants, giraffes, water buffalo, and zebra. The only sign of human habitation at all was the occasional two rut dirt trail through the bush and boundary fences at the edges of the national parks. For three hours of low level flying we did not see a single human being on the ground. This flight was my third since my instructional flights last Thursday. On Sunday I rode along in FMS's Cessna 207 as it was flown to South Africa for maintenance. We flew into Krueger, South Africa where we cleared customs and then to White River, a small private strip. There we dropped off our 207 and picked up a loaner aircraft for use while ours was being worked on. The runway at White River was 1500ft long and one way due to a significant slope. It was perfect for the 207 and real fun to fly in and out of, even if I wasn't at the controls. It was a delightful flight over some simply magnificent terrain if not a little on the longish side being nearly 7 hours there and back. On Monday, I took my checkride with the chief pilot in our King Air. I thought it went pretty well given that I had a grand total of 2 hours in the airplane prior to the ride. However, I did learn the hard way that the C90 does not have the surplus power that the 1900 had. There can be absolutely no delay in retracting gear and flaps single engine the in C90...or it simply won't maintain altitude. At any rate, I passed the checkride and as of an hour ago all of my paperwork has been submitted for my Botswanan licenses. Hopefully, by the end of the week or early next week I'll be fully licensed and flying actual revenue flights! I'll post pictures of my flight to South Africa later today. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera for the flight in the King Air. :-(

Back in the air at last....

Well, today the waiting ended and I actually got to fly again! What a good feeling. I came in a little earlier than usual this morning and spend some time with the chief pilot, Tim talking through profiles and checklist procedures. Then it was actually time to take to the air with Dan, the company safety pilot. On the first flight we simply took off and flew around in the practice area to the north of Gaborone and did some visual maneuvers. I admit I expected the C90 to be very similar to the 1900 but it really just wasn't. For one, checklist and cockpit procedures are a lot less regimented than they were at the airline and I have to admit without strict procedure to follow I felt a bit lost. And then there is the airplane. I suppose being fully half the weight of the 1900 I should have expected it to fly a little different but it was very surprising for me to see how light and responsive it really was. I had a lot of trouble initially with over-controlling and over-trimming the airplane. It took a while for me to realize that this airplane simply did not need the large amount of control force or travel to make it do what I wanted. And even then it was one thing to know what I was doing wrong and another to retrain my hands and feet from three years of 1900 flying. However, given all of that I guess I performed acceptably well because we did a second flight this afternoon that was all instrument training. I was a bit surprised that I felt more comfortable under the hood but I definitely did. We went again to the practice area and did some instrument air work and then returned to Gaborone for a couple approaches. We initially flew the full ILS to runway 08 at Gabs including the procedure turn. However, procedure turn inbound we discovered that the glideslope was out of service. We quickly rebriefed the approach for localizer only and continued the approach. After executing the missed approach we requested vectors back around for another try. However, as we intercepted the localizer on the second approach Dan reached up, retarded the right engine to idle, and announced that I had lost an engine. I quickly ran through the steps to secure the engine and continued the approach. It wasn't perfect but again, it must have been acceptable because upon reaching MDA Dan told me I could look up and there was the runway...right where it was supposed to be! We continued the approach to a landing and that was the end of my flying for the day. I think that they are going to try to do the Botswana equivalent of a part 135 check in the next couple of days for me and then I should be able to apply for a license here. Then, once our residence permits come through (should be sometime next week) I will actually be able to begin flying on revenue operations for Flying Mission!

Hurry up and wait....

Well, the last few days have been pretty uneventful. With the Air Law exam out of the way (which I did pass, as I hoped, with room to spare) I spent the last day or so completing the remaining in-house exams. With those exams completed, there isn't much to do until they are ready to start flight training for me. However, I don't get the feeling they are racing to get me finished with my flight training since even if they were to get me done in the next couple of days and licensed, I still can't fly for them until I have a residence/work permit. That could easily take another few weeks. I have continued to go the airport every day though. I have spent a lot of time reading the manual for the aircraft and sitting in the cockpit mentally flying through the manuevers that I am going to have to do in training. It has been good time but slow. I guess this is what they mean when they say "Africa time"....everything takes a little longer than one would think that it should.