Dog charlie - was that John Simmler by any chance, in his TAA days in PNG?
Chuck - if you can't find it first go then there's probably little risk you'll be calling it a poor judge of character. Which is what Doug Muir used to say of his. There was a quack patching Doug up once after some minor calamity who said to him that there must be only one unscarred part of his battered old body, to which Doug said not so. When Doug was a little tadger on the farm at Maitland he was pissing on the rooster through the chicken wire. Silly little twerphead neally had his pecker pecked off.
Which all has SFA with the delights of muscling round the traps or the circuit in the wheelhouse of your Dak, whatever the weather. (Only sooks complain of wet trousers.) My endorsement was on the one CSIRO had for cloud physics, VH- R squared alpha. Everything felt JUST RIGHT from first encounter. First go was L seat SYD-Tamworth on a beautiful summer's morning, with LR (Licence Renewal) Jackson doing the honours. Easing her round on arrival onto a right base 12, sliding over the fence and holding off, holding off for a tail low wheeler seems like yesterday, the sensation is that lasting. (More so than first solo).
Some of the best PNG DC3 stories are in 'Balus' by James Sinclair. A classic book all the way through. (I recently taped a chat with Ron Roberts, QF, who did a lot of time on Cats in PNG and who features in 'Balus'. Fantastic tales of battling the hazards on the Fly, like whole tree trunks floating down ready to knock a float off, which happened to Ron. He saved the ship on that occasion.)