Finally...

I got to go flying!!!!!!!!!!!!! You may have read in the blog from yesterday that we do medivac flights. This actually seems to be a little under half of our current flying. The Department of Health gives us a contract to perform these flights and then they pay for them. They give MAF the contract because we are willing to work 7 days a week and do it reliably. Also our fleet, pilots, and overall quality or our program are better than any other option.

My boss was "on call" yesterday for the weekend and called me when he got his first flight. It was to pick up a patient that had fallen 40 feet from something and broken a lot of bones and was barely alive. About halfway enroute, the doctor canceled the flight because the electricity came back on. This enabled them to do what they needed for treatment. Previously the power was out and they couldn't help this person out at all, thus we were called into action.

So we returned to the hangar only to get 3 more flights that had been called in from the jungle via HF radio. We flew out about 30 minutes, dropped a girl off, flew from there about 25 minutes and picked up a boy with a broken arm, and them flew from there about 25 more minutes and picked up a girl who had hit her head diving into the river. From this strip we were only about 20 miles from the Peruvian border. We then returned to Shell and got these patients on their way to the hospital.

It blew my mind again that I will soon be flying these same flights myself. It is such a different world out in the jungle. It is everything you have seen on National Geographic, and then some. And then we fly our little time machine back to "civilization" here in Shell and do it all over again. The jungle is so vast and open, a very powerfull experience. I cannot wait to show it to some of you.

(This is final approach on one of the three strips we landed at yesterday. The weather was great! This is a very typical strip, just a little slice carved out of the jungle)

(Here we are at the strip where we loaded the girl that hurt her neck and spine jumping into a river. My boss Dan, in the blue shirt, is loading some live chickens and other various things into the belly pod.)