No Obie whothe is not getting 'your drift' he is shaking his head at your naive statements/questions...as am I.
PNG is different to Australia. PNG relies near totally on aircraft and coastal shipping for transport - there are a few roads but the number is so small it is meaningless when you take into account the dangers inherent in driving anywhere outside the main coastal towns.
The aircraft PNG relies on are for the most part GA level - Twin Otters/Islanders etc. There are maybe 15 destinations domestically that can cope with aircraft Dash 8 size and maybe 10 that can cope with a jet like an F28 (in my day)/F100. Not all of those 'main ports' have reliable terrestrial navaids...it wasn't unusual to operate F28s 'visually' - it was common to operate the Dash 7 that way on RPT flights.
To give those numbers some scale I operated in/out of 318 bush strips (total was north of 400 'licensed' bush strips in PNG) in my time in Talair etc on RPT flights.
So the VAST bulk of flying in PNG is pure VFR tropical jungle bush flying - with all that entails weather/terrain wise - mostly operating to some form of schedule. I don't know the exact % but probably 75% of the PNG population still lives in villages in remote swamps/coastal areas/Islands or high mountain valleys completely cut off from the world outside that valley except via a grass strip cut into whatever terrain the village was built on 1000 yrs before aircraft were invented.
high 6 mentioned the walk from Isurava to Lake Myola taking 2 days - it is about 2 minutes in a Twin Otter. That give you some sense of the terrain?
In the mountains GPS is of very limited value (in fact it is near useless) and I point blank, absolutely refuse to believe this crew was fcking around with TAWs/EGPWS. You do spend your entire working day 7-10000' below 'lowest safe' altitudes.
PNG is terribly unforgiving of a bad decision. It will never be different. It is at the same time the most wonderfully satisfying flying and the most deadly.
It has as much similarity to operating in Australia as the Space Shuttle program does to QF's B744 operations.
Last edited by Chimbu chuckles; 12th Aug 2009 at 13:06.