I am finally getting a day away from flying so I can write a more in depth update.

Aceh province is coming up from the incredible depths of desperation which were seen in the early days following the tsunami. A couple of points of comparison may help to put this disaster in perspective:

The death toll from the tsunami just in Indonesia is greater than the death toll from BOTH the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs. The physical devastation is, however, far greater. The devastation is spread over 100 miles of coastline, including the ex-towns of Calang, Lhok Kruet, Laguen, Lhong, Krueng Sabee. Kuede Panga, Keude Teunom, Bubon, Arongan, Woyla, Locj Nga and others. We have been flying this coastline daily or twice daily delivering medical supplies for diverse organizations, including first and my hats off to them Mercy Corps. Also Norwegian Church Aid, Missionary Aviation Fellowship, Global Relief, Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. In addition to the workers, we have also shuttled refugees and medivaced injured patients. By the way we brought Pippin back to Simeuleu, her home, after she recovered from her brain surgery after our medivac from Meulaboh. The smile on her and her fathers face was worth everything I have invested in this effort. You can look at the pictures before and after and understand why tears come to my eyes when I think about it.

Speaking of tears coming to my eyes, we have stopped flying low altitude coastal flights up the Aceh coastline. The emotional load on the heart and the mind is simply too high. There is never a smile from a pilot or an aid worker as we gaze at that coastline. The grim faces and tears from the refugees tells a bigger story. The plane is silent unless we identify a potential airfield or point out a helicopter coming our way. Loch Nga which was a city on the northern coastline used to have about 35,000 inhabitants, a busy center and an airport. Now there is simply a mudflat. Think about a city of 35,000 people, eating, playing, loving, smiling, driving, simply going on about life on a relaxed morning, and 20 minutes later they are ALL dead and the city simply GONE. I cant even think about without tears streaming from my eyes, but then there is also Banda Aceh where hundreds of people are looking at hundreds of posters of missing family members, still hoping. There are almost a quarter million living people without homes. Susi is actively distributing pictures of the children of one of her good friends from Singapore. She had sent her children to Banda Aceh to visit her parents on the 24th of December. Her parents bodies have been found and buried, but her children remain missing  but not her hope. It is a rare person here who has not lost some or all of their family. Yet their smiles and words of appreciation still come out to us. The Acehenese and Indonesians are some of the kindest people I have ever met.

Mike, Dan, Christian, Manan and myself continue to fly intensive flight schedules. We are always up before 6AM and rarely return before 7 PM. We are flying a scheduled flight service for the Red Cross/Cresecent between Medan, Meulaboh, Banda Aceh and Simeuleu. Most of these flights operate at sub capacity but the RC bylaws prevent them from carrying anyone other than RC personnel. Mercy Corps uses at least two flights a week and maximizes their use per dollar. They were here early and efficiently. Mary Beth can be a pain to deal with when she tries to cram every last kilogram into the plane but she has made sure she was getting the most for the Mercy Corps dollar. We will miss her as she leaves for a break next week. She helped us examine the load capacity of the Caravan one day as we loaded 80 wheelbarrows. Doctors Without Borders has come in now in strength. They helped us test the volume limits of the aircraft as they filled it with many many boxes of syringes along with a refrigerator. They are launching an intensive preventative Tetanus vaccine campaign for refugees in Tapaktuan before they are sent back to the remains of their towns. Many bodies are still being recovered and buried as debris is cleared and the tetanus threat remains.

Lately medicine has been replaced with wheelbarrows, hammers and handsaws. Refugee camps are now visible from the air in their tents. Supplies remain jammed at Chalang as the coastal highway is totally destroyed. There are dozens of missing bridges over all the coastal rivers. Most of the coastal road is destroyed, in other areas it is gone with the roadway being replaced by ocean. Our next challenge will be to build tiny airfields for a STOL (short takeoff and landing) plane to start operating. This will be far more efficient than the dozens of helicopters currently serving the remote areas. The plane we want to operate carries twice the load at half the price of a helicopter. We are working on getting one here ASAP. We need funds to operate this.

Earplugs are a necessity when at the airports. Dan expressed his feeling yesterday that we were in Vietnam while standing at the Aceh airport. There are 200-300 helicopter operations per day out of Banda Aceh. Given 12 hours of daylight, that is 20 per hour. At one point I counted at least seven aircraft in motion at or over the Aceh airport. One was a heavy lift chopper with a truck in sling load, made to hold over the ramp for about 5 minutes after takeoff with the truck hanging over the 737 on the ramp which is being cut up after hitting water buffalo on the runway. The Air Traffic Control here is atrociously bad. They have no experience with intense operations and make numerous mistakes. Luckily most of the pilots are aware of the inefficiency and incompetence and manage to work around the disasters ATC is trying to create. The huge mountains and numerous thunderstorms of the monsoon season dont help anything. Lots of cumulogranite around here. ATC cleared us straight through a 7,000 mountain a few days ago at 4,000 feet. We ignored their clearance which put us IMC in an area of great traffic. However we do have our own TCAS and terrain avoidance system aboard.

The emergency relief business is becoming painfully clear to us. There is no organization set up to deal with immediate disaster relief. Contracts have to be made. Numerous meetings at the 5 Star hotel have to take place before that happens. Contacts with the head organizations back home have to take place. Approvals have to be given. Examination of the company records for 2 years past are made. Contracts are not given if the last 2 years weather reports are not in your files. Contracts dont happen. Planes dont fly. Days and then weeks pass. People go without food water or medical care- except for individuals who work from the heart and simply GO HELP. They fund themselves from their own pocket. They eat crackers or nothing while out helping in the disaster remains, lending anything they can to anybody in need, while the Big organizations sit at the Novotel Hotel and discuss contracts over appetizers and drinks. The UN finally got their helicopters operating  almost exactly a month after the tsunami. How about the people who died as a result of laying under rubble for days and weeks with no one to help while the Big organizations had their drinks at the Novotel?

There are many many individuals, some who actually work for the Big Organizations, that were in the field as soon as they could get here. Not the organizations but individuals. Much good was done. Many lives were saved. We saved numerous lives with our initial missions in my plane. It probably cost me the plane as the cost to examine the engines after the landing gear mishap may be higher than the value of the plane. But when I look at the faces of the people I saved, some who I know, some who I do not; when people come from nowhere and ask why are you here and I tell them I came to help, the tirami kasehs (thank yous) are sincere and profound. That is why we came here, why I invested everything I have, to see the smiles of the people that would be dead without us.