The hotel restaurant was on “island time,” and the promised breakfast appeared to be still only a promise by 7:00 a.m., so we headed for the door to get our promised ride to the airport (a ways down and around the atoll from downtown Majuro). Our apparent determination to get to the airport on time finally got some results and the driver showed up only fifteen minutes late. We were met at the airport by our handler who gave us our flight plan and weather paperwork. Breakfast was going to have to be more of what we had been munching along the way – several types of trail mix and granola bars. We also broke out the loaf of bread, peanut butter and jam my wife had sent with us, and would fix our breakfast after getting airborne. We wanted nor more delays.
Amazingly, we were airborne almost on time for the shortest of our three over-water legs of this journey – only 1,745 nautical miles from Majuro to Pt. Moresby. The last third of the flight was also going to be close to multiple islands and alternate landing sites at Bougainville, New Ireland and New Britain Islands, all territories of Papua New Guinea.
The area of monsoon weather whipping the Pacific into whitecaps below had remained stationary around the Marshalls, and after a couple hours we had dodged our last thunderstorm and were breaking into the familiar calm and sunny skies that we had seen earlier on the trip.
We made our first landfall in PNG as we approached Buka on Bougainville Island.
But the “mainland” was still hours away, and our destination lay on the far side of a 12,000’ ridge of mountains.
These Garmin screen shots show the MFD and PFD views of the terrain as we approached the main island and crossed the ridge before our final descent into Pt. Moresby.
We were met by Rick Nachtigal, one of our pilots in PNG, and our student in the Kodiak back at JAARS in July. He ushered us through the Customs and Immigration process and we were officially in the country.
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