As with all of us, the simple things that goes on day to day as we live life often gets overlooked. One thing we have often said is we wished so many of you could see the life we lived just so you could experience it for a day. So we wanted to write about “travel in PNG”!
Some of our traveling is done by a commercial airplane company (Air Nuigini) however, most of our traveling is done by small airplane which is operated by NTMA (New Tribes Mission Aviation). So any time we go to another mission location it is always by airplane. If we go to another city it is mostly by airplane as well. That is just the way life is here as there are not many roads to connect.
We have been doing it for years and just recently our mission took a huge step to change airplanes. We went from Cessna 206’s to Quest Kodiaks. In many ways it has made life easier here, as we can now get more cargo on each plane that goes into bush locations. It is also 100 times easier to get fuel for the Kodiak planes. Cessna’s take Avgas (which was very hard to get in this country) and now we can use jet fuel, which is much more widely available!
So as you can imagine living in such a rugged and remote country, our flight program is such a vital part of our church planting team. NTMA is comprised of pilots, mechanics, flight coordinators, etc. We have an entire team dedicated to aviation. The work here would not be able to go on with the efficiency that it does without them. They bring in supplies to our bush missionaries, do emergency medical flights, take consultants to and from to help with language checks, translations checks, church planting checks, etc. They play a big part of life as we live in a country with very little infrastructure.
So there you go, another aspect of our daily lives here in Papua New Guinea!!!!