and let's get on

Afterthoughts With Percy Chatterton

Forger the frills and let's get on wirh the flying

After James Sinclair’s Wings of Gold it seems almost an imper tinence to write about air travel in PNG. Moreover, I am no longer an air traveller, and when I have occasion to go to Port Moresby’s Airport, and see how complicated air travel has be come, I’m glad to be out of it all. My air travel was done in

simpler, more casual, though slower days.

I remember when we went to Australia in DC3s. It took a whole day to get to Sydney, with calls at Cairns, where we had an easy-going passage through customs, and Brisbane. The return trip was spread over two days, with an overnight stop in Townsville, at one of the noisiest hotels I’ve ever stayed in.

How different it all is now, with non-stop jet flights direct to Sydney. On internal flights within PNG the changes have been mainly in the types of plane used.

I have vivid memories of touching down at Tapini, a hair raising strip sited on a ledge on the side of a great mountain, with other mountains crowding in on every side except the one from which the approach is made. In those days the trip was done in an Anson, a slow but reliable plane. I especially remember an occasion on which I was invited to sit up front with the pilot. As we swerved downward towards the strip, it became quite clear to me that we were going to crash into the cliff face about three metres below the lip of the ledge and plunge into the gorge below. I glanced at the pilot. He didn’t seem to be worried. He didn’t need to be; we made

a perfect landing.

Happier memories are of trips from Yule Island to Daru in a Catalina flying boat, with a detour up into the central mountain range to ‘land’ on the surface of the incredibly beautiful Lake Kutubu.

Everything about the Catalina was easy-going. The crew were based in Moresby and knew all their regular passengers. ‘Charge it to the LMS’, I would say as I climbed aboard.

I was caught out one time though. While I was spending a couple of weeks at Daru, a Sydney-based Sandringham ser vice was temporarily substituted for the Catalina. ‘Charge it to the LMS’, I said as I climbed aboard. ‘What’s the LMS’? said the Sydneysider.

I explained. ‘Well’, he said, ‘if you want to travel with us you’ll have to have a travel warrant signed by the head of your mission’. I quailed at the thought of spending another fortnight at Daru. Doing my best to look haughty (something I’m not very good at) I said: T am the head of my mission’.

It wasn’t completely untrue; I was the head of its Delena branch, and temporarily of its Daru branch too. Anyway, it worked. I was allowed to write myself out a travel warrant, and was back at my Delena home that afternoon.

But the writing was on the wall. Not very long after that a brisk young woman at London Airport insisted on seeing my PNG entry permit before she would let me board a plane for Hong Kong. The paper war had spread to the skies.

That’s why I’m rather glad my travelling days are done, in spite of Air Niugini s glamorous Bird of Paradise service, its

glossy in-flight magazine Paradise, and its paradisal air hostesses.

Bryan Grey, Air Niugini’s first general manager, has done an outstanding job in building up Air Niugini as our national ‘flag carrier’, though his blunt manner has failed to endear him to some.

But while Air Niugini promotes our international prestige and cossets our ministers and other parliamentarians on their frequent trips abroad, it is the third level airlines which provide an unostentatious service for the majority of PNG’s ordinary citizens. As the archdeacon of Popondetta recently complained, he doesn’t want to go to Paradise, not just yet anyway; he only wants to go to Lae. He has a point. Most PNG air travellers don’t want to go overseas, don’t want to be waited on by glamorous air hostesses, and don’t want to read in-flight glossies. They just want to be put down as near to their destinations as possible.

On the current controversy over the partial, and projected, total closure of the present Lae Airport, which is close, perhaps too close, to the city, and its replacement by the new Nadzab Airport, 40 kilometres away, I, as a resident of what the prime

minister refers to as ‘the southern part of our country’ but which some of us still prefer to call Papua, am not competent to offer an opinion.

But I am intrigued by a notice, which is reported to have appeared on a construction site at Nadzab, which reads: ‘Erec tion of restaurant and VIP lounge for the people of PNG by the Government’.

On this I would make two comments. First, we don’t need the VIP cult here. Overseas bigwigs are our honoured guests; and Melanesians have their own ways, and very good ways too, of doing honour to their guests. Local bigwigs are our wantoks; and they’ll do well to remember it.

Second, if the government really wants to do something for the people of PNG in relation to air travel, the best way it can do it is by giving the third level airline operators a fair go-