Another New Opportunity for SIMAIR

This week, we flew to another new location for SIMAIR. This trip was the culmination of discussions that began several years ago and God working to open the doors for it to happen. We often fly some co-workers with a sister organization to various places around West Africa where they work with the Songhai people. On one of these trips, they mentioned that they had started working at a location in a neighboring country to reach the Songhai people there as well. They had been traveling 7 hours over some rough roads to reach this town. There's an airstrip at the town and it would only be about an hour flight for us to fly them directly there. Unfortunately, we aren't allowed to fly directly there without first flying to the capital city to enter the country. Flying to the capital first is way out of the way and puts the cost of flying out of reach.

A few weeks ago, the man who bought two of our old SIMAIR planes flew to Niamey for a few days. We parked his plane in our hangar while he was here, which we like to do to help him out. I asked him if he thought Civil Aviation in this neighboring country would give us permission to fly directly to this airstrip. He said that his organization has an office in that town and they are the ones that maintain the airstrip. He also has a lot of contacts at the department of Civil Aviation since he lives and works in that country. He was happy to take our flight clearance request and work on getting the approval for us. After two weeks of visiting various offices and reprinting our request which the offices lost, he wrote to say our request had been approved! The timing was perfect.... two days before the date for the requested flight.



I flew the two passengers there early in the morning. Here's the dirt airstrip with the white markers outlining it. Because of recent happenings, they wouldn't have even been able to go by road along their normal route. Instead, they would have taken a two day circuitous route to get there.


Here they are after the quick flight.


We were met by some of the local police, who had been told beforehand that we were coming. We were also met by a co-worker with a third organization who has been working in this town for a long time.

The local kids were very interested in the plane arriving. We picked up the passengers a few days later. They were pleased with their time there and the visit they were able to make to surrounding villages.