Pilot Anger Management
Job done, cones in place, anger managed! ;-)
The Local Government finally did some work on Telefomin airstrip at the start of this month, after Ryan had been asking for more than 3 months. Sadly, due to neglect, the wheel ruts on the bottom of the airstrip had gotten so deep that it was unsafe to land on that part of the runway, so Ryan had to displace the threshold (make the usable part of the runway shorter) by 490m. Thankfully, our airstrip is 1250m long, so that still left Ryan with plenty of length to take off and land safely, even with full loads.
The central 5m of our runway is gravel, then it’s grass out to about 40m total width. A local construction crew was tasked with the job of scraping some of silt off the surface of the bottom end of the airstrip, adding some new gravel, then compacting it with a roller. The work eventually got done, but it wasn’t quite finished. When Ryan inspected the work and put the cone markers back to show that it was all safe to land on again, he found a large lump of topsoil which had been left just at the edge of the gravel. If this had been left, there was a risk that a plane could have hit it whilst landing which could have been dangerous. So Ryan got a spade and made it safer by digging some of the top soil out and bashing some of the stones in… A good session in anger management!
Bashing stones into place.
Spreading out the big lump of top soil to make it safer.
The surface of the gravel runway with new gravel applied, but before the roller came and compacted it - The line of cone markers show the displaced threshold, the end of the safe, usable airstrip.
The central 5m of gravel on the Telefomin airstrip after the new gravel was compacted - This picture is adjacent to the MAF base looking up the airstrip.
All the cone markers back along the full length of the airstrip, it only took us about an hour to get them all back in place - Picture taken from the road across the bottom of the airstrip where we take Koda for a walk most days.
Koda and Shiv on our morning walk around the airstrip once the cone markers were back in place.
