I'm in the UK now. Been watching the series.
The story being told is, I believe, rather misleading. They are definitely sensationalizing things, and the pilots that are 'hamming' for the camera for their 15 minutes of fame are not doing the story any favours either.
"if you can see through it you can fly through, that's the rule here in Africa"
He does fly between two cells. However, they are benign cells, and they are very far apart. How do I know that? well, the plane doesn't bounce around at all. It's perfectly smooth air the whole route. So I would guess that the cells are 60 to a hundred miles apart. But, when you see the video, it looks like they're about 2 miles apart.
"there's so much water on the runway that he might not get the plane up to speed, and if he doesn't lift off before the end of the runway it could mean every one on the plane will die"
Apart from the obvious slur on a pilots ability to make a sensible decision to stop the plane if not up to speed by a certain point.... the plane lifted off at about the mid way point on the strip, and there was NOTHING at the end of the strip except flat sand/dirt (not even any shrubs).
I have yet to see any mention of the actual job of unloading and loading passengers and bags within 10 minutes in 45 degree heat. Every time there is a turn-around, we see the pilot taking at least a half hour to take a trip in a bakkie to see the lions in the grass a kilometer away, or talk with the passengers about this or that.
The 3rd episode was interesting, very interesting. For a lot of reasons. One of those was a pilot upgrading to the C210. And on the check ride with the chief pilot, there was the obligatory simulated engine failure and gear failure. The pilot was 'shocked and suprised' that the chief pilot would give him a gear failure to handle. The narrator went on and on about this checkout process as though this guy had to do something that most pilots don't ever see... I can't remember a single checkout in any plane in the past 22 years where the instructor didn't do a simulated engine failure and if the plane had retractable gear, the ONLY time I didn't have a 'failed gear' exercise was in a comanche (and if you manually extend a comanche gear you have to put the plane on blocks and have a mechanic re-connect it, so that's not normally done in a PA24).
Also in the 3rd episode, 2 pilots were hired. I learned more about the hiring process in about 10 minutes than I did in 4 months on the ground there and 2 years of reading everything I could about it. Secrets revealed...
They also made the pilot that was hired look totally inept and incompetent. (window opened by 'check pilot' on take off, plane swerving down the runway, for example). But he was still hired. I doubt the flight was as bad as the narrator and camera work made it seem.
But I will tape and watch every episode, it's great to see the places and some faces again.