Annual recurrency

Having been back in Indonesia for a week now, I guess it’s about time I updated the blog really. Sadly I’ve still not actually flow the Porter again this year for a couple of reasons. The first of which is upon returning to Indonesia after my Christmas holidays, I had to attend a mandatory recurrency course at our headquarters in Pangandaran, Java.

The syllabus of the course is set be the Indonesian aviation authorities (DGCA) and involves classes on Aviation Security (AVSEC), dangerous goods, wind-shear, Crew Resource Management (CRM) and a simulator session. There’s also a few tests on company literature and aircraft emergencies and limitations. All of this is run in-house apart from the AVSEC course for which a local company is contracted to run it for now, although I understand we will soon be able to run those in-house too.

On the runway in Timika in our G1000 equipped Cessna 172 simulator

Our company owns three simulators; a basic SEL Elite IR thing, a G1000 equipped C172 Acent simulator and a custom made C208 simulator based around the legacy caravan. For my sim session we used the C172, as it’s about as close as we have to a Porter and being G1000 equipped, at least the avionics were familiar.

All one can really do in such a sim session is practice some IFR procedures such as approaches, holds etc. and generally have a play around with the G1000 to see if I could learn a few more things I didn’t know before.

The classroom side of things were all condensed into a day starting with the AVSEC course. This course always amuses me as Papua is so far removed from the standard Indonesian regulations, it almost makes it rather pointless. Still, the lady running the course was fully aware of how different Papua was with it’s lack of x-ray machines in the remote villages and tried to keep things as relevant as she could.

The wind-shear and dangerous goods courses were of more use and it’s always interesting to hear other pilot’s experiences of these matters. However, the CRM course is setup for pure multi-crew flight operations and as such of no use to single pilot bush operations.

Cessna C208 at Pangandaran beach airstrip

All in all, I guess it wasn’t a bad couple of days and keeps the authorities happy that I’m signed off on all the legally required training for another year. It was also good to catch up with a few friends I’d not seen in a while who fly the C208 and P180. The flight back to Jakarta handily departed directly from our beach front landing strip as we thankfully had a spare aircraft down in Pangandaran for training.

The captain doing the training on said aircraft was one of my good friends and our Jakarta base manager, Capt. Lukas Fellinger, who also flew us back to Jakarta. Shame the weather was rather nasty on the flight back but at least we saved the hour long drive to Pangandaran’s main airport of Nusawiru where the regular scheduled flight usually departs from.

My good friend Capt. Lukas flying us out of the beach strip, Pangandaran

A surprisingly clear Jakarta skyline flying into Halim airport

Sadly upon arriving back into Jakarta I was hit with a rather sudden and very unpleasant dose of food poisoning. If you thought the red-eye flight back to Papua was horrible on a normal night, try it when you don’t know which end to present to a toilet! Thankfully I’ve just about recovered now and should be back flying around the skies of Papua next week.