Chimbu,
A agree with your underlining - I wasn't trying to suggest that flying a turbine around PNG is easy - the extra performance maybe sometimes making it just a bit easier
(to get INTO trouble as well as out...)
Full sympathies to your mates on the hills around Goroka - it is not hard to envisioin ways that could happen...
It is just that now the vast majority of commercial work outside of airlines (which now only go to the main centres - unlike Talair) is PRIMARILY work for logging companies or mines. The bush really is suffering and yes - in many cases they have just been deserted. Admittedly some more roads have been developed in some places but then there are plenty that have gone 'baggerup' and are impassable to vehicles too!
MAF is now the biggest server of the bush strips and they are absolutely sick to the teeth of being mobbed at strips by people desperate to go places. They along with anyone else trying to make a buck out of the bush also find it hard to make it profitable with hugely increased operating costs - don't even start on the fuel availability and the rediculous prices... Coffee prices haven't gone up enough to offset all those increases which cuts directly into profitability! Combine that with staffing difficulties (hard to get experienced people to fly and engineer in the PNG bush...) and government malpractice and neglect of anything important.
When you get some tribe threatening pilots and not looking after their airstrip (forget government help in that area) and people trying and expecting to go places without paying the proper airfare... There are strips now where everyone has said 'stuff it' - we just can't go there anymore and it is not worth the risk to our aircraft and pilots! And basically I think that is probably the bones of it now - the bush is just plain 'TOO HARD!' in so many ways.
Why has Airlines PNG pulled aircraft out of PNG for their Australian ops? Easy really - much easier to make money elsewhere!
Rambling rant over!