The latest Cole Communique
Our June Newsletter has been delivered into inboxes…
The link to read it and watch the videos is in this blog.
Easter Weekend
We had a fun and busy long Easter weekend with visitors, a picnic, Easter Egg Hunt, meals with friends and a visit to one of the local villages. Lots of fun but it ended with saying goodbye, as things so often do in our life in PNG…
The Cole Communiqué - March 2023
Our March Newsletter went out to all our subscribers over the weekend, but for those of you who don’t want to receive our news in your inbox, you can read it all here…
Unexpected weekend in Australia
We enjoyed some luxuries in Australia, like shopping at a supermarket and brunch! It was a great opportunity to get away.
The MAF Mareeba Engineers did a great job on P2-MAF!
Washing the Balus
There are 2 aircraft based at Telefomin, and with the majority of the Bush airstrips that we serve being grass, the planes often get muddy, which keeps the base staff busy washing them.
Welcoming friends home
When we visited Goroka last week we were fortunate to be there when 2 MAF families returned to PNG.
They were flown home by a Mt Hagen based plane, we had one of the Telefomin planes and Goroka has 2 planes of their own, so we had 4 MAF Caravans in Goroka at the same time (for about 30 mins), a very rare sight.
The Newspaper Pilot
Ryan was featured on Wantok newspaper's Facebook page last week!
This is a great partnership we have with Wantok. Each week our pilots take 100 papers to rural places to keep these communities engaged in what's happening in PNG. Regularly, MAF articles get translated and printed in the paper too!
Ryan flew these newspapers to Mougulu, in the North Fly district of Western Province whilst he was dropping off building materials for some new dormitories for their High School.
Ryan’s First Day Solo Ops!
Friday was Ryan’s first day flying solo ops out of Mt Hagen! No more training pilots checking up on him, at least for now…
On Wednesday he will have training in how to do Airstrip surveys, then, if all is as we expect, we should be able to return home to Telefomin on Thursday!
Simulator Flight Training
This week Ryan is doing flight training in the new Red Bird C208 Caravan simulator with fellow pilot, Corné, from the Netherlands. Because of COVID, the MAF trainer based in Cairns isn’t able to come to do the training in person, so a couple of the pilots have managed to rig up cameras, speakers and a microphone. It’s a great set-up, until power or the internet goes wonky, as it is often inclined to do in PNG. But the training is progressing and Ryan should be back in a real cockpit at the start of next week!
Click on the picture, left, to watch a video of our friend, Nurse Rhema, one of the local health care workers who MAF supports and we fly out of Telefomin.