I believe the premise of the show is to highlight how our company takes on pilots with minimal flying experience and how they are trained up to fly the Cessna Caravan out here in Indonesia. In addition to the newbies learning the ropes, there should hopefully be a fair amount of footage from the more experienced pilots out here in Papua showcasing the challenges we face daily, and the more bush and mountain flying side of things.

I’ve not actually seen the show yet as as I’m still out here in the jungles of Papua but hopefully it’ll be as entertaining to watch as it was to shoot. I was involved with two separate sessions of filming, firstly in Timika with Dom and Mus, and then in Nabire with Stevey and Mark. All of the guys were great fun to work with and certainly taught me a fair bit about how TV is made. It’s more hard work than you might imagine and requires a lot of repetition. And I mean A LOT of repetition!

Due to that repetition I felt like I was saying the same things over and over again in various situations, so it will be interesting to see the final edit; hopefully I come across ok and don’t sound too much like a fool! As it’s a TV show made for a wide audience, I know some things will be sensationalised a fair bit but that’s to be expected. So for all you aviation fans, just try and look past all that and enjoy the show; there’s not many aviation based TV shows, so we have to accept that in order to make them appeal to a wider audience, things will get over-egged a bit. Hopefully it’ll be an entertaining series and give you a look into the daily lives we all live out here in Indonesia.

The four part series Worst Place to be a Pilot will start at 9pm on Channel 4 in the UK on 19th August 2014. I’m told I’ll feature in the third and forth episodes. An international release should follow at some point with additional footage.

UPDATE – May 2015

The TV series is now being shown on Discovery Channel in the USA titled Air Pressure and can be seen on Thursday evenings. Check your local TV guides for exact times.

UPDATE – October 2015

The TV series is now being shown on National Geographic Channel in Australis titled Pilots Under Pressure. Check your local TV guides for exact times.