Flights

This week we had a full week of flights to the south and east of Chad for a variety of different reasons. The south of Chad is currently inaccessible by road as the recent rains have caused quite extensive flooding and a journey by road to the east of the country can take a couple of days.

  

• On Sunday we flew a group from a Chadian sugar company to Banda (south of Sarh). The pilot waited at the airport while they had meetings and then brought them back the same day. We would not normally fly on a Sunday and we do a limited number of these 'commercial' flights but Jakob (who is currently here as our relief pilot) was happy to do the flight and after a relatively quiet month of flying in August we were very pleased to get the booking.
• On Monday we flew a missionary family to Am Timan, after they had spent nearly two weeks having a break in N'Djamena. They had taken the opportunity of being in the capital city to stock-up on supplies for the next few months so we also had over 200 kgs of freight. In Am Timan we picked up three Americans who had been in Chad on a short-term trip, helping to install solar and battery power at the compound of another mission organisation.
• On Tuesday we flew a group of five leaders from the Chadian church to Moundou for meetings with local church groups. The meetings were scheduled to take all afternoon and evening so the pilot stayed overnight and flew the group back to N'Djamena on Wednesday.
• On Thursday we flew to Guereda (east of Abeche) to collect a missionary family who are having to leave Chad at quite short notice because one of them is sick and cannot get the treatment they need here.
• On Friday we flew to Banda again so more employees of the sugar company could have more meetings.

It was a busy but satisfying week...



Preparing the plane for a flight on a stormy Sunday morning