Twin Commanche arrival
Twin Commanche arrival with Cessna in the background
Dwayne with his parents, getting ready for takeoff
The last month has been busy and gone by too fast. The week
before Christmas Gary Roberts arrived in Davao, Mindanao with the Twin
Commache after 71 flight hours. A week before he arrived the Civil Aviation Administration of the Philippines instituted a new memorandum that said no private
foreign registered aircraft can operate domestically in the Philippines. This was not good news for us as the Twin Commache is still US registered but it was too late to do anything about it so we just prayed and hoped for the best. I had submitted a request for a waiver of this new regulation but being just before Christmas nothing was happening quickly and when I met Gary in Davao we still did not have an operating permit so we were stuck there. I asked my friend in Manila to also apply for a one time flight permit from Davao to Clark so we could at least get up to Luzon.
We went Friday morning to the Davao airport and started working on refueling the plane and getting the seats back in after pulling the ferry tanks out. It was getting early afternoon and still no permits but we needed to move the plane to park in another place longterm. So I left Gary with the bags to find commercial tickets and I moved the plane to the other side of the airport. I got a call from my friend in Manila after I parked the plane saying he just received a one time flight permit from Davao to Clark.
Fortunately Gary had not purchased tickets yet so we stayed the weekend there and flew the plane up to Clark on Sunday. We had just enough time to get back to Manila and get a good nights sleep before Gary's flight back to the States on Monday morning.
I had submitted a request again for a waiver of the new regulation and prayed we would be able to get an operating permit so we could fly the twin Commache again. I just called this afternoon to see if any progress had been made and they told me a 6 month operating permit was ready to pick up so we are praising God for that miracle.
I drove back to our airbase with Wendy's parents on Christmas morning and they stayed with us for a week and helped with some of the finishing work on our new container house. The day after they left I headed back down to Mindanao with Danny and our Cessna 172 to look at some potential airstrip sights and to meet and plan for our
future aviation work in Mindanao. We arrived back in Luzon a day before my parents arrived for a visit from Montana. We have been enjoying our time with them.
The ladies-Wendy and her moms
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