First Flight

Aside from our "normal" flying, we sometimes do some short flights that are a bit different. A while back, we had the chance to do a quick flight near the city for some guys who've done a lot of work for SIM over the years. These four men are all skilled workers (welder, mason, plumber, carpenter, and also a foreman). They've been involved in virtually every building project we've had in the city over the past 10+ years. They've worked on our houses, the office, built new buildings at the school, and done projects at the hangar. One of them has been working for SIM for 20+ years. None of them had ever been flying in a plane before. One of the planes needed to do a quick local flight one day, so we worked it out to take them along.


Ian took them up for the flight. It was quite an adventure for them to fly and see the city and their neighborhood from the air. The perspective is completely different. What fun it was to see the delight on their faces and hear them talk about the experience. "The houses, cars, trees, everything looked like toys."


This was a simple way to show our appreciation for all the work these men have done for SIM over the years.


Here they are in the plane getting ready to head out for the flight.

Yesterday we had another opportunity to give a first flight for some other people. One of our co-workers asked if we could do a quick flight for his son, who's graduating from Sahel next week. He brought along two of his classmates. I decided to take Silas and Elayna along on the flight as well. We recently installed a little child bench seat in the back of the diesel plane. It took us 3 years to find one of these seats (pictured above) for the plane. The diesel plane has four regular seats. This little bench goes in the baggage area and will allow us to fly families, with a few more kids, all together on the same flight. Elayna was the first person to try out the seat. You can see she was quite excited at the beginning of the flight. Unfortunately, she got sick right at the end as we were returning to the airport.


Silas had never gone on a flight with Daddy before. He's been waiting anxiously for his turn for a long time and was delighted for his chance to go.