Are runways like rusks?

I had my first rusk today. You may think this is about 41 years too late, but of course I'm talking about South African rusks, which are delicious. The great thing is you can dunk them in tea or coffee and although they soften a little,they don't then flop straight into your drink like the ubiquitous digestive or hobnob.

By coincidence, today's main excercises concerned soft-field and short-field operations. Some runways are hard and remain hard (although maybe slippery) when wet. Other runways, such as those made out of dirt or rusks can get soft and boggy when wet. Aircraft tyres can easily sink in, and so we practice techniques to land, taxi and take-off on soft ground safely.

It is also the case that rusks are small and narrow, and sometimes MAF aircraft have to land on short and narrow rusks, err,  I mean runways. Again we practice techniques to safely land in a relatively shorter distance compared to a normal landing.

My previous flying experience with good old Alpha-Whisky at the winter quagmire that is Popham airfield set me in good stead for some of this, but ANA is a big girl and takes some stopping. Please excuse me for not introducing you earlier. ANA (Anna) is the lady with whom I've been sharing these adventures. As you can see she's a generously proportioned American redhead, in her 30's. She's quite loud, especially in the mornings, and she drinks like a fish (around 60 litres an hour) but she's smooth, gentle and very forgiving!

Brits and Braais

Welcome to Brits. Yes this is Brits airfield, a few miles west of Joburg, bathed in morning sunlight. Today's sortie started with an 'airfield evaluation' at a disused airfield called 'Odie airstrip', now used mainly for drag racing. You may recall from my Nampa training (see November 2011 blog) that sometimes in Africa there is scant information about an airfield (it's length, surface condition, slope, surroundings, close by obstacles) and so it is necessary for us bush pilots to have a means to assess these things on the fly. So today I tried to recall that which was drummed into me at Nampa, during a high pass (1000ft), medium pass (100ft) and low pass (5ft). Yep that good old low pass. At 5ft we were just about skipping over the tops of the fuel drums which currently mark the edge of the drag racing portion of the strip.

After Odie we moved on to Brits, a longer airfield nestling below a range of hills. Unsurprisingly oh the way my instructor and I discovered some 'problems' with the aircraft, eventually ending up with a practice forced landing (glide approach) into Brits. Rest assured that in real life MAF aircraft have one of the best safety records in the world of aviation. However in training there is an average of 3 emergencies per flight. Today's were: a window coming open in flight, a sick passenger (fortunately not fully simulated), an engine failure after take-off, and a rough-running engine which eventually stopped when I was within gliding range of the field. As the old chinese proverb says "the more we sweat in training, the less we bleed in battle".

 

Then we turned back towards Lanseria and I was given a simulated low-cloud and storms scenario, forcing me to fly low over the hills/mountains pictured right. You'll be pleased to hear we made it through the gaps and back to base for lunch.

Today was the birthday of one of the MAF SA staff, and local tradition requires a braai (BBQ) and chocolate cake so we had boerewors (curly sausage) in a bun for lunch. I  must introduce the same birthday tradition back in MAF Kenya, although it will probably be with goat.

Back to Basics

Another Hangar, another country

Greetings from South Africa. It's been a while since my last post, but since this is about my flying antics, it's really only appropriate to post when I'm flying, which I did today.

First though, a brief update: Since arriving in Kenya just over two months ago we have settled in to a great house in a good location, we've bought a car, and I've sat a couple of flying exams. The first was a Commercial Pilot License conversion paper, which was basically a mini-version of the 14 exams I sat four years ago in the UK. Interestingly enough the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority has saw fit to buy the European exam question bank, so many of the questions were familiar.

The bigger test however was finding the place. I nearly became famous as the only pilot to have failed the paper because he couldn't navigate successfully to the exam centre, which doesn't bode well for finding a dirt strip in the middle of Turkana.

Despite that little drama, I did recognise many of the old JAA ATPL questions and some I even got right, managing to scrape a pass with 81%. Phew. Some of my former colleagues in both MAF and AIMAIR have taken several attempts to pass this exam, so it was great to get it over and done with.

The second exam was a type-rating exam for the Cessna 206 aircraft. This was also filled with incident. Normally in a multiple-choice exam you find one correct and 3 wrong answers. In this paper many of the questions had 3 correct answers, and some had 4 wrong answers. Subsequently I found I had failed with 62%.

The following week, last Wednesday to be exact, I did a resit. This time I sat the correct paper (don't ask, but let's just say that the invigilator the first week was a trainee and I had been given an out-of-date exam for a different aircraft) and passed with 94%. That's Africa for you.

So now I find myself at Lanseria Airport (NorthWest of Jo'burg) doing a week's training in the venerable 206, prior to starting as a line pilot back in Nairobi. Today was 'becoming one with the aircraft-again' after a period of six months absence. So we strapped in, learned yet another set of checklists (for some reason MAF International and MAF US ones are different) and taxied out. We took off (5kts slow, ouch), flew around, did some stalls and steep turns, flew back to Lanseria, landed (5kts too fast, double ouch), did a few more circuits and landed again. Marvellous. If you take my take-off speed, add it to the landing speed and divide by two, I was spot on. Still it's always good to manage my instructor's expectations and leave room for 'improvement' as the week goes on.

More tomorrow....