2012!!

We're in 2012!! Happy new year to you all!

We drove home from North Carolina last Saturday, in time to see in the new year at home here in Coshocton. We got back here around 7:00pm (midnight back in Scotland), and decided we were happy to call it 2012, and have an early night instead of waiting up a few more hours for the EST midnight to strike!

As always, we had a great time in North Carolina, catching up with our friends and relaxing in a wee break from the normal routine. The kids had a great time catching up with their "American cousins", and the weather stayed nice enough for them to get plenty of time outside. We stayed around the house for most of the week, only venturing out for one day trip. We went to Charlotte and had our first visit to an American Ikea since we got here! You will be pleased to know that the meatballs here taste exactly the same, and the bookcases all have the same strange names!

The Christmas gathering!

Monday saw me back at work for the annual inventory check - you might remember the blog post from this time last year. My first job when I started in the hangar in 2011 was the stock-take, so it really felt like a full circle, and the start of my second year here. Unfortunately my week went downhill after that! I have been nursing a cold for the Christmas week, and it got the better of me yesterday morning - hopefully I'll be back to work tomorrow, but I have needed the last couple of days to get myself back to better health.

Gabon 207

Those of you who followed all the work we did last year on the Gabon 207 will be pleased to know it has now made it "home" to Gabon, where it will soon be back in service with the Bongolo Hospital! It left Coshocton last November, and spent December at Weaver Aero, in Kansas being fitted out with auxilliary fuel tanks. These tanks extend the plane's endurance to 15hrs, giving it the range needed to complete the journey across the Atlantic to Africa. Even in this day and age, when flights between Europe and America are as easy as catching a bus (if a little bit more expensive!), the flight this little plane was taken on was quite an expedition! It was a big enough deal loading our wee family into the car for the 8hr journey down to NC, without thinking about climbing into a little plane (with a huge tank of fuel behind you!) and setting off alone out over the Atlantic in the middle of winter!! John from Weaver is a brave man!

John is greeted in Libreville by Steve Straw. (The big silver box in the plane is the extra fuel tank!)

You can look back over the journey on Steve's blog at http://gabonpilot.blogspot.com/ from when it left to Coshocton to arriving in Gabon, and I am sure he will be updating it over the weeks ahead as the 207 gets back to doing what it is intended for. Thank you for all your prayers as we worked on this aircraft last year, and as it returns to service in Africa.

As I said in my last post, January should be bringing a trip to Papua New Guinea for me and two of my coleagues here. We are waiting for our passports to come back to us from the PNG embassy with our newly issued visa's, then we will be ready to book flights, pack bags and head off to the other side of the world for 3 or 4 weeks. I am really looking forward to it, but as you can imagine it is a big deal to leave a pregnant wife and two kids at home while I jet off, so we would really appreciate your prayers on this.

Thanks again for all your support, messages, & prayers - they are really appreciated!

Rapid Responses!

When we came back from Scotland in October, I had some really good intentions of keeping the blog posts regular… It seems like the last couple of months have flown by, so my apologies for turning regular into “once a month”.
As Heather said a week-an-a-bit ago, I had a fantastic opportunity to spend the first couple of weeks of December down in Florida on a “Rapid Response” trip. MMS’s mission statement is to “prepare people and planes for worldwide mission service”, and for the most part, that means having apprentices work on mission aircraft at our hangar here in Ohio. The training is fantastic, but if it lacks one thing it is the chance to work in an “operational” environment, maintaining planes that are being used on a daily basis. Sometimes it isn’t possible to have aircraft transported to Ohio, and the opportunity comes along for apprentices and staff to travel to the plane to carry out the work needed. This kills two birds with one stone, giving mission organisations an opportunity to benefit from MMS’s service, whilst giving apprentices valuable experience working in other “field” environments.

One of MFI's DC-3's prepares to leave the hangar

Missionary Flights International have been offering a regular service to missionaries operating in Haiti and the West Indies since the 60’s. As well as a Cessna 310, the MFI fleet is made up of 4 DC-3 aircraft. These planes were built from the 30’s through to the end of WWII, and as you can imagine for aircraft that are in their 70’s, they take a lot of looking after. Of the 4 planes MFI operate, 2 are turbine powered and 2 have the original type radial engines. The turbine planes are more powerful, able to carry more payload, faster and more economical to run, so it makes sense that they are the ones normally flown. When the opportunity came up to sell one of the radial engine planes, the need to carry out some major maintenance became a bit more urgent. As MMS have a long history with MFI, we were asked to go down and help out with this work.

Old engine on the right, new engine on the left, and 400MF behind.

Myself and Chuck flew down the Monday after Thanksgiving, and got stuck straight into removing the engine from the left wing of N400MF. Most of our fortnight was spent on transferring brackets, hoses and accessories onto the new engine, and getting the new engine ready to hang on the wing. When we run out of parts, there were lots of other jobs to do, with some airframe repairs underway in the tail of the plane. On our last day there I was able to get involved in a 100hr service on one of the turbine planes, then help out with an oil change on the Asas de Socorro float plane which stopped off in Florida while on it’s flight to Brasil from MMS in Ohio. (See below for Keith's video on that)

It was a busy two weeks, but a fantastic opportunity to get a taste of another organisation’s ministry, and the way they operate. Working on these old aircraft was made even more special when I discovered that one of our good friends from Pitlochry Baptist Church (and one of the people who first got me interested in MAF) was one of the pilots who ferried N300MF to Florida from England in the early 80’s!

N300MF

The New Year will probably be bringing another Rapid Response trip, provided all the visa applications currently in progress go to plan. JAARS http://www.jaars.org/ have a large base in Papua New Guinea, where they operate a variety of aircraft in support of Bible translators and other missionaries who serve in that part of the world. They recently had one of their aircraft damaged, and myself, another MAF apprentice, and one of the MMS Staff, have been asked to go and help them carry out the repairs needed to get the plane back into service. That will be a slightly longer trip (3 or 4 weeks), and the internet won’t be as “high speed” as it was in Florida. Please pray that Heather and the kids will be well while I am away from home. Abi and Matthew were a bit out of sorts while I was gone earlier this month, not understanding why dad was working “at the hangar” but not coming home at night. I will be literally on the other side of the world this time away, so having the kids settle well while I am gone will be a real blessing to Heather, and a reassurance to me. I can’t even imagine still being in my old job on the ships with my wee family left at home!!
Right now we are busy getting packed up for our Christmas holiday. We are going to visit our good friends in North Carolina for the week, returning next Saturday. We’re all looking forward to catching up with them again, and to celebrate the birth of Christ together.
Wishing you all a happy Christmas, and all the very best for 2012.

A baby changes everything!

November has flown past and I can hardly believe it is less than two weeks until Christmas day! We enjoyed two wonderful thanksgiving meals with friends near the end of November. One was with our church (about 300 people), the other was with out MMS friends here (about 30). We have now been in the states over a year and Andy and I still have our Scottish accents, but alas both our children are talking more and more like Americans! :0)

Andy went to Florida for two weeks with another colleague and returned on the 10th of December. They were working with Missionary Flights International in Ft. Pierce. Andy will write more about this in the next blog.

I did not anticipate how hard it would be to find time to blog while he was away but as you can see it did not happen. Being a single parent is tough and I only had to do it for two weeks! Part of the reason it was so tough was due to the fact I am expecting our third child and being in the early stages of pregnancy with two little children by myself was a challenge and we often shared the same bed time! I am so thankful I have an amazing God to depend on and I truly experienced his amazing strength and grace throughout those two weeks. Andy arrived back on Saturday and has a few days off to recover from his long working days. We are really enjoying some family time together before he goes back to work tomorrow.

We are looking forward to Abi's first School production tonight - The Gingerbread Man. She has been entertaining me for weeks with the songs and she is so excited about being on the stage.

Matthew has been quite unsettled without his dad and is glued to his side at the moment in case he should disappear again! LOL!

It was a wonderful experience telling the children on Saturday about there new expected sibling due to arrive next June and quite humorous listening to their reaction. Abi is so excited and is already working on some names! Matthew is just not sure what to think - if he can't see it then it doesn't make too much sense yet.

The mother and toddlers I am starting up is going really well and we have provisionally been offered premises at the Job and Family Services department in the town. This will be finally be confirmed in the next few weeks and we will hopefully be able to start mid to late January.

Andy will post soon about his Florida trip. Sorry there are no pictures with this blog like the others but please bear with us as we adjust to the changes going on and the run up to Christmas. :0)

Thank you for taking the time to read this and share in the adventure with us.

Love from Heather, Andy, Abi , Matthew and bump! ;0)

The 207 finally takes to the skies!

Today has been an exciting day in the hangar. After 7 months of hard work, the Gabon 207 was finally able to make it’s return to service flight! Steve Straw ( http://gabonpilot.blogspot.com/ ) arrived back in the States the day before we left for Glasgow, and I thought that by the time we got back to Ohio, he would have completed the RTS flight, packed up, and headed off back to Gabon. A couple of hiccups with parts not doing what they were meant to do after such a long time out of service, meant that the re-commissioning of all the systems couldn’t go past the ground runs while we were back in Scotland. But the delays that came about from waiting for new parts to arrive gave another opportunity to improve the plane for the work it will be doing in Gabon.

The air traffic control network in Gabon is not as developed as it is here in the States, so the distance between people that can hear you on the radio is much greater. To make for a safer operation, and to open up more opportunities and resources from other people on the ground, a radio system with a greater range was needed. The radios that are installed on most light aircraft are VHF radio, and have a limited range because of the frequency they transmit on. HF radios use a longer wavelength, which gives them a much greater range.









When it comes to aircraft, you can’t just kit your plane out with “go-faster” spoilers and alloy wheels. Every modification that changes a plane from the way it was when it rolled off the production line, needs to be approved by the FAA. The application for the HF radio upgrade went in quite some time ago, but these things take time. Returning the plane to service was more urgent than waiting for this approval to come through, so the plans looked like they might have to be shelved. A little delay in getting off the ground was just enough time for the FAA approval to go through at the 11th hour, so Steve will now be able to return to Gabon with an aircraft that is much better equipped for the work it is meant for.

Having spent so much time working on this plane over the year, it was a bit sad to see it fly off, but knowing it will be back at work in Africa soon is a good compensation… and it free’s up quite a bit of hangar space for the next project… I wonder what that will be???

Off into the next chapter...

The video!

I have just realised that those of you who receive our blog by email probably won't be able to see the video I posted last night.

If you can't see the clip, follow the link below and that should get you to it!

Thanks for checking in!

http://youtu.be/uuF_1BITgK8

When Heather posted our last blog and said that it would be the last one for a while, a bit of me thought that I might get a chance to blog again from Scotland while we were home… I should’ve known that we would be so busy we would have no chance of writing blog posts!

We had a great trip back over to Scotland for the best part of October – we flew into Glasgow on 13th October, then spent the next fortnight driving about 850 miles, with another 800ish on the sleeper train. We slept in 5 different homes (and the sleeper train!), shared at three Sunday morning services, one midweek meeting, and held a Saturday morning presentation and lunch in a coffee shop. We got ourselves up to date with the dentist’s and the optician’s. We got our fix of Scottish food and enjoyed a bit of Chinese and Indian foods as well!
We were also able to catch up with lots of our friends and family, which was incredibly encouraging for us. Thank you all!! It was a real shame that we just didn’t have enough time to catch up with everyone we wanted to – if we didn’t make it round to you we are sorry.
The main reason for being back this year was to renew our visas. We are here on a vocational student’s visa, with a one year validity period, so every autumn will see a trip back to the UK. The visa interview went without problems, and despite my not being able to follow the instructions on photo’s for the kids visa applications, our visa’s were renewed and we were able to return home to Ohio as planned! After finishing at the American embassy around lunchtime, we had lots of time for a bit of sightseeing in London before our train back north.

Big Ben!!

Our trip back home didn’t go quite to plan. When we arrived to check in at Glasgow airport, we were told that our connection to Columbus had already been cancelled. They managed to book us on a later flight on Saturday night, and off we went to New York. By the time we arrived in Newark, the East coast was caught in the teeth of the first winter storm of the season – a whole 1.3” of slushy snow had fallen, and the airport had ground to a halt! After finding out about our 2nd cancellation of the day, we were able to rebook to fly to Columbus on Sunday morning. We were fortunate enough to find a hotel room to stay in for the night, and all four of us had a great night’s sleep! It probably worked out for the best, as the only option we really had was to go to sleep at 7:30pm – had we been able to get home on Saturday, we would have likely been up too late unpacking, and Sunday would have been spent like Zombies!
Monday morning had us all getting back to normal, with Heather and Matthew running errands around the town, Abi back at school catching up with her friends, and me back in the hangar. It was good to be back at work, and getting my hands dirty again.

While we have been away, the Gabon 207 had a few teething problems as it was being prepared for its Return to service flight, and the FAA gave an 11th hour approval for an HF radio installation which has been pending for a while. The problems have all been straightened out now, and Mike, Phil and Jim are busy working on the radio system. Hopefully it will be back on it’s way to Africa soon, although from a purely selfish point of view, I am glad I will be around to see it’s first flight since arriving in Ohio, having spent so much of this year working on it!

The Gospel Carrier Internation Cessna 172 I am currently working on, in front of the Gabon 207.

This week, I have been helping on an annual inspection on GCI's cessna 172. Yesterday we were overhauling the nose landing gear strut, and today we removed one of the main landing gear wheels for inspection, and to clean and re-grease the bearing.

When we were back in Scotland it was good to be able to show a short video clip of the work I am involved in here in Ohio. Just in case you didn’t see the clip while we were in the UK, here it is!

Almost a year!

We arrived last winter, so this is our first experience of Autumn in Ohio. Let me share a few differences we have noticed. Firstly, it is called "the Fall" which makes perfect sense of course. Also Pumpkin season is here and they are everywhere!! Although not a fan of pumpkin soup, I do like a little pumpkin pie! :0) Another difference is the weather. Last weekend it was windy, cold and raining - not something we are unfamiliar with. I got the duvets all out of storage and washed the blankets and put them away, We got the last air conditioning unit out of the window and stored in the garage. Then by about Thursday, I had to fold all the duvets and put them away again and get a few blankets out for us all it is getting hot again just like summer! The children are never sure weather they need winter or summer pyjamas. I have to watch the weather channel every morning before I get the kids their clothes as although the mornings can be really cold, the afternoon is often shorts and T-shirt weather. Another thing is the bugs that are trying to come into our house to hibernate for winter! Ladybugs (ladybirds) - but I believe they are called the Asian beetle lady bug. they like to swarm and are attracted to light coloured houses on the hillside - just like ours. They are don't do any harm, they are just a pest and even with insect screens on the doors of windows - I have to keep the sun facing ones closed as they get through the nets. Good preparation for what's ahead! :0) The trees are of course beautiful and another highlight of "The Fall" is Coshocton County Fair. Unfortunately it was very wet for the first while so when the first dry day came on Tuesday - I took the kids out for the morning. Eight dollars each gets you into the fair for the day. Almost all the rides are free and there is plenty to see and do. We saw horses, sheep, cows, goats and llamas among others. There were tractors, pick up trucks, horse and harness racing, and lots of interesting new foods to try such as "elephants toes" (made from doughnut batter caked in cinnamon sugar and dipped in butter icing) There were also many prizes for the largest home grown fruit and vegetables as well as crafts and exhibitions. We were really glad to be able to experience it and are looking forward to next year.

Matthew had a trip to a local Farm to make a scarecrow and pick a pumpkin. We got to ride on the hay wagon behind the tractor and that was fun. The tractor took us on a five minute ride to the pumpkin fields where we were free to choose one to take home. The preschool have another morning available for him starting November so he will be going two mornings a week. He seems to be really enjoying his time there.

Abi has had her fifth birthday party today which was great fun. We played pass the parcel, Simon says, pin the tail, and had a princess treasure hunt outside. The man next door mowing his lawn must of had a good laugh at us running about the garden in pink, blue and yellow fluffy dresses, ( I had my wellie shoes on!) Dangling from different trees in the garden were pink shoes, a pink hat, pink scarf, princess story book, and a hair brush - the things you do for your loved ones! Then it was time for some pampering with nail polish before stuffing our faces full calorific delights! It was a great excuse to dress up and I found another use for a previous bridesmaid dress!

Andy is really busy in the hanger at the moment. They are putting the final touches on the 207 plane as it gets ready for a test flight next week. This will be our last blog post from Ohio until November as we are flying back to Scotland this coming Wednesday until the 29th. Now that the birthday party is over I can focus on packing the suitcases and getting ready for catching up with our supporters, family and friends. I hope we can see as many of you as possible over the next few weeks. Please email me if you would like to recieve our newsletter and are not already doing so, and if you would like any more information about where we will be speaking during our visit - heatherswansonmaf@gmail.com .

Heatherx