From another perspective. I flew a RAAF VIP Convair 440 Metropolitan from Momote to Moresby in 1965. Our passenger was the Australian Minister for the Navy, Fred Chaney. Shortly after take off at Momote we heard via HF that a RAAF Caribou had crashed at Porgera and the two pilots were badly injured. It was being arranged they should be medevaced to Mt Hagen by Cessna 206 and then to hospital at Lae.
We were given approval to divert to Mt Hagen airport and pick up the injured pilots and take them to Brisbane where medical facilities were better than PNG. We landed at Mt Hagen which then was a brand new airport recently opened. I think the runway was about 5200 ft long.
While waiting on the tarmac for the medevac Cessna to arrive, we noticed a Baron take off only to return 15 minutes later after completing a weather recce. The pilot was taxying very fast on the way to the tarmac and narrowly missed our Convair, his wingtip just missing the tail of the Convair. It was extremely poor airmanshp by the pilot.
His name was Heli Schuchnigg - the senior base pilot of Talair at the time. He came across as a cocky character and was an Austrian pilot who migrated to Australia after the end of the war.
The Cessna turned up and we carefully loaded the two RAAF pilots on stretchers into the Convair. We were told to take them to Lae. The takeoff from Mt Hagen used the full length of the runway. It was the first time I had flown a Convair from a relatively high altitude airport. The performance charts we had for the Convair were US Air Force charts which did not have all the takeoff performance information apart from sea level figures and Mt Hagen had a density altitude of around 8000 ft. No wonder we used the full length before lift-off. We would have been in real trouble if we had lost an engine as there was no way the Convair could have climbed away on one engine.