What were we doing in PNG?

So for the last 3 weeks myself, Mark Beckwith and Jim Newman have been working with SIL Aviation. Mark is another of the MAF / MMS apprentices going through the programme just now – he is about a year ahead of me and is expecting to be sitting his exams towards the end of the summer. Jim is an experienced mechanic and one of the training staff at MMS where he has been serving for a couple of years. Before that he served in Bolivia with World Gospel Missions, looking after their Cessna 206. Jim and his family are from Texas originally, so he also fulfilled the role of our “token American” on the trip!! It just doesn’t seem right for two Brits to be telling people that we are from Ohio without having an American accent somewhere in the mix!!

Last post I mentioned that the plane we were to work on was a Beechcraft King Air 200, which has been part of the SIL Papua New Guinea fleet for the last few years. One of the advantages of having the King Air is that it’s pressurized cabin and twin turbine engines make the trip to Cairns, Australia much quicker more comfortable. Often this trip has to be made for Medevac flights when someone falls ill in the more inaccessible parts of PNG, where medical help can be difficult to come by. (While we were in Ukarumpa, two aircraft had to be sent on separate medevac trips to Cairns from the SIL Ukarumpa base, and aircraft were put on standby to do the trip a couple of times as well).

The King Air showing off it's collapsed landing gear.

Last April the plane was on a training flight when the pilots realised they had developed a fault with their landing gear. After going through all the procedures they have for this kind of situation, they came in to land with the gear in as secure a position as they could make it. The landing was successful, but on taxiing back to the hangar the main gear collapsed. As far as landing gear failures go, it doesn’t get much better, with such slow speeds and a nice soft grass strip! It did manage to do a fair bit of damage to three or four of the frames that make up the skeleton of the fuselage just beside the door at the rear of the plane however. It also damaged the two skins that cover this area. This was the project we travelled out to work on, and the first week and a half were spent preparing for and then rebuilding this structure.

The damaged area we were to repair; you cn see the space where 3 damaged frames have been removed from the belly.

The two skins had to be specially made by Beechcraft for us, and although they had been ordered last autumn, they still hadn’t made it to PNG by the time we arrived. One skin arrived shortly after us, and we were able to do the prep-work on it ready for installation. Unfortunately the other skin was the one that had to be installed first, so when it didn’t show up until 2 ½ days before we were due to leave, we were under a bit of pressure to get as much done as possible while we could. The other factor that slowed us up with installation was the sealant – because the King Air is a pressurized aircraft, every seam has to be buttered up with sealant, and every rivet has to be driven with a dod of sealant on it to ensure that the plane stays airtight, and doesn’t leak when it is pressurised.

In front of our handiwork...

As it was, we managed to get all the structural work done, both skins installed with sealant, and enough rivets to hold it in place on the aircraft. We were a little disappointed that we were having to leave Tyler with 1500 or so rivets still to drive, but pleased that we were able to do 400 or so man/hours of work that the SIL Aviation guys would otherwise have had to fit in around their day to day responsibilities.