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| PAC-750 wreck in Bilai, Papua |
A little while back, in the village of Bilai, a Pacific Aerospace P-750 XSTOL suffered an incident on landing which damaged the airframe beyond repair. Since then the wreck has been sitting off to the side of the runway, pretty much untouched, until recently that is…
The local villagers have finally decided to make use of all that aluminium and have converted the upper parts of the fuselage and cargo pod into roofs for their trailers:
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| Cargo pod roof |
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| Cabin roof |
The wings now form the walls for an outdoor shed to house their generators in:
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| Wings for walls |
You’ve got to admire the Papuan methods for recycling; very green people!
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| What’s left of the PAC-750 |
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Tell us… have you had any close encounters yourself? You land and take off in some pretty rough air strips, in what must often be pretty rough winds!
Yeah there’s one that comes to mind that happened during training which my instructor can recount even better than I. We landed to find we had no left brakes and came off the side of an airstrip, narrowly missing a hole large enough to rip the undercarriage off…
As for the winds, we try to do all the critical mountain airstrips early morning (before 10am) so avoid the winds that build from then onwards. Adiabatic winds and short airstrips are not a good combination!