Sunday 11 December 2022

Flying with Mum

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to take Bethan along on a flight. Since I started flying on the Caravan Bethan has been keen to come along but there hasn't been a flight with space on a day when she wasn't at school until now. The flight was to the north east of Chad, stopping in Guereda and Abeche, in total 6 hours of flying. She was super excited to come along, and packed a bag full of snacks and things to keep herself occupied. 

The flight out was to take a passenger to Gureda to spend time visiting her family there, the flight back was to pick up a family who are normally based in N'Djamena and so Bethan was also excited to pick her friends up. We also flew over the flooded parts of the city on the return, and saw a practice parachute drop just after landing.

en-route to Guereda

Here are her thoughts on the flight: "I didn't realise how bad the flooding really was until I saw it from the plane. The flight was quite long but I really enjoyed it. My favourite bit was picking up my friends and meeting their new kitten who came on the plane with us."

Flooding in the neighbourhoods by the river in N'Djamena 


The following weekend we had another flight, but this time to a much closer destination so Luke came along. On the flight down we didn't have any passengers so Luke had a quick flying lesson. The flight was to Pala, one of our bush airstrips, to pick up a team of pastors who had been visiting churches in the area. Luke was not very impressed to find out that there wasn't a tarmac runway. He also wasn't impressed with the children that kept running down and across the runway when we wanted to depart meaning we had a 10 minute wait at the end of the runway for it to be clear.

Luke "It's not really a runway, it's just ground"

Luke's thoughts on the flight "it was fun and exciting, I liked steering it when it wasn't on autopilot"