jarjam
If you want that kind of life experience flying without the bible, Air Serv maybe the outfit your looking for but you you will need to hold an FAA licence. Web:
http://www.airserv.org/ I seem to remember that MAF used to train pilots at Headcorn (Lashenden) EGKH in a Cessna 180.
Good luck
STOL
Edited to ad:
Air Serv
MINIMUM EMPLOYMENT QUALIFICATIONS
PILOT QUALIFICATIONS
Captain of Aircraft US License PIC TurbinePIC ME PIC
Single Engine Recip FAA CPL/IR 1200
Single Engine Turbine FAA CPL/IR 1500 100
Multi Engine Turbine FAA CPL/ME 1800 100 500
and a reality check of the work,
AIRLINE DODGES MISSLES TO BRING AID TO IRAQ
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Ten thousand feet above this city's newly reopened airport, Air Serv International Capt. Chris Erasmus nudges his controls until the plane banks left and then slowly spirals down to the runway in a complicated corkscrew maneuver.
The landing -- aimed at making it harder for insurgents to hit the plane with a missile or rocket-powered grenade -- isn't all that sets Air Serv apart from other carriers. Its planes, mostly 20-seater prop-jobs are so small heat-seeking missiles can't easily track them; they have no bathrooms, food service or flight attendants. Tickets generally are available only to employees of the United Nations or international aid groups such as the Red Cross. The airline itself is a nonprofit humanitarian organization, founded nearly 20 years ago specifically to fly aid workers in and out of some of the world's riskiest spots.
In fact, Air Serv is the only civilian carrier still flying Iraq's unfriendly skies, where aircraft dodge attacks from the ground nearly daily. After a missile struck a DHL cargo plane shortly after takeoff last month and forced it to make an emergency landing with one of its wings ablaze, the only commercial carrier flying into Baghdad, Royal Jordanian, suspended service indefinitely.
While none of Air Serv's planes has been shot down or damaged in Iraq, the small carrier has had close calls elsewhere. In the Sudan several years ago, one of its planes landing at a small airport rolled over a powerful land mine that shattered its windows and sent shrapnel tearing through the wings, but amazingly, no one in the plane was hurt. A decade ago, one of its pilots, an American named Jeff Butler, was shot and killed by bandits who broke into his camp along the tense Somali-Kenyan border.
Such dangers come with the territory for Air Serv, whose fleet of 22 planes and helicopters ferry humanitarian workers into hot spots like Kenya, Congo, the Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan. "We go where aid groups need us, which means we're often right alongside them on the front lines and in harm's way," says the airline's chief executive, Stuart Willcuts.
Even before the outbreak of the Iraq war, Mr. Willcuts and other Air Serv officials traveled to Kuwait and Amman, Jordan, to begin to arrange permission to fly into Iraq as soon as hostilities ended. Air Serv began flying into Baghdad on May 1, and has operated the service continuously despite Iraq's deteriorating security situation.
In the first weeks after the war's end, Air Serv's daily Amman-Baghdad flights were packed as hundreds of aid workers and U.N. employees descended on Iraq to begin medical, educational and other projects across the country.
All of that changed when militants drove explosive-laden vehicles into the Baghdad headquarters of the U.N. and Red Cross in recent months, killing dozens. Today, the airline's planes out of Baghdad are still full, but
many of its flights into the country are largely empty as aid groups cut their staffing or order workers to cycle out of Iraq more frequently. A flight into Baghdad last month, for instance, carried one foreign-aid worker.
"It's been really hard for the humanitarian community to adjust to the fact that they're being actively targeted in Iraq even though they're totally nonpolitical and are just trying to make people's lives better," says Don Cressman, a former Canadian bush pilot who in 1989 began flying for Air Serv in Mozambique and is now its vice president of international operations. "The terrorists don't seem to care who they hit, so long as it's a foreigner."
That has led to some heart-wrenching flights for the airline and its crews as they airlift wounded aid workers out of the country with alarming frequency. The day after a car bomb killed 26 people at the U.N. compound here in September, for instance, Air Serv flew dozens of wounded U.N. employees, some on stretchers, to Amman for medical care. Last month, meanwhile, Air Serv flew an aid worker, shot in the head, throat, and chest near the northern city of Mosul, out of the country for emergency treatment.
Air Serv, based in Warrentown, Va., was created in 1984 during the famines that killed hundreds of thousands in Mozambique and Ethiopia and sparked renewed Western interest in Africa. The airline was set up to get aid workers safely into difficult-to-reach countries. "We're the people who get the aid workers to the end of the line," Mr. Cressman says.
That, in turn, means often dealing with the unsavory characters who control the countries or regions the aid groups are trying to reach.
Scrupulously apolitical, the airline won't fly into a war zone like Congo unless it has permission from both the government and the rebel groups controlling the airports it needs to use. Mr. Cressman says crews often ended up in tense standoffs in Africa with guerilla leaders demanding to use their plane to carry weapons or wounded fighters. The demands are always refused, he says.
Air Serv has a budget of $16.5 million this year, the highest in its history, because of the enormous expense of its Iraq and Afghanistan flights. Most of its funding comes from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.N., which allows the airline to sell seats to aid workers for $165, about a quarter of their actual cost, and often allows U.N. employees to fly free. It also occasionally has received money or goods from foundations and companies such as FedEx Corp., of Memphis, Tenn., and Britain's BP PLC.
The airline has dozens of employees around the world. Many joined the airline after long careers with other aid groups or out of a sense of adventure.
Erwin Temmerman, a soft-spoken Belgian who runs Air Serv's Iraq operations out of a modest suite of offices in central Amman, spent more than a decade working in Africa for the International Rescue Committee and other aid organizations. "We contribute to a lot of good work by helping other aid workers get into places like Iraq to do what they do best," he says.
Others joined Air Serv for the excitement. "When you fly for the major airlines the planes are so big and automated that you're really just along for the ride," says Capt. Erasmus, who flew in the South African Air Force and for several commercial airlines in South Africa before signing on with Air Serv. "Here you go to places and do things most pilots only read about."
Meanwhile, Air Serv officials say they don't plan to change the airline's operations despite the missile attacks at the Baghdad airport. "There may come a time when we say that we've done all we can but it's simply too dangerous to continue," Mr. Cressman says. "We don't want to be the CNN headline about a plane being shot down."