An Idea

There are many short grass airstrips in the Congo. The length limits the load an airplane can carry into and out of the field. Many of these fields have soft surfaces too, further limiting the loads.

These limits have real consequences for real people, as the above story illustrates.

It is possible to ease or eliminate the restrictions by lengthening the fields. The good thing is this can often be done by simply cutting the grass. If further improvements are needed, these can be sometimes done by simple means with local materials.

The best example of this is Tshumbe airfield. They cut the grass, covered the surface with ground up termite mounds to make it firmer and created hardpads with river stones. Voila! They had an airfield we could use a King Air on with no restrictions.

All of this was done, to my knowledge, with local materials and labor. No machines.

It would be good if all the NGO's that use airfields like Karawa, Kole, Monkoto etc. , could get together and create some kind of program whereby we could get these places improved. We could then fly in larger aircraft with larger loads resulting in good things for many people.

I don't know how to get this kind of thing going. I fly the plane. It would be good if somebody who knew how to do it, would.