Originally Posted by
troppo
It's kinda sad that there are only an ever decreasing number of old timers that contribute to this thread. At the same time it's surprising that current pilots contribute little in the age of smart phones. Too busy on Facebook and Instagram?
I’m sure some, like me,relive their youth occasionally by looking at the thread. You are correct in that there probably are not many ‘old timers’ left that can be bothered posting or younger ones at that.
Certainly not an ‘old timer’ - was there from 1970-74 but had many adventures arriving as a 20 year old, including having the best ‘chief pilot’ in my ‘career’. Who can forget the variables of landing on a strip at dawn in the Morobe area, the smell of the cooking fires and the smoke they produced waffling along the strip, the headman presenting you with a sackfull of succulent oranges to landing at Tanga off New Ireland where the nuns would ply you with ‘Tang’ and a sack of lobsters...
The flying was great but the characters you worked with and the swashbucklers, Kiaps,plantation managers ex-‘Coast Watchers’ and others who had made PNG their home and sometimes their ‘hideaway’ made it a fascinating facet of my life which I have never forgotten. As I type this, visions of these people - most long gone, names that wouldn’t mean anything to most people now but all had the best interests of PNG at heart.