Mazamari

Mazamari is located in a mountainous region of Peru, about 200 miles south of Pucallpa. While the scenery if beautiful to look at with many waterfalls and mile after mile of virgin jungle, the terrain can create challenges as clouds can obscure mountain peaks and haze limits visibility to 3-4 miles. One of the tools we use to avoid the cumulous granite is topographical information that is displayed on our GPS units. This is backed up with charts that have predetermined routes with known altitudes for crossing passes and entering valleys.

The day we returned to Pucallpa, the haze was thick and I had to fly half of the flight solely with reference to the flight instruments. Thankfully I had just finished some Instrument training when I was in the USA over the summer so the skills were fresh in my mind. By the way, the color GPS is so easy to use even a pilot can figure it out. The red shows terrain that is above your present altitude and the yellow is anything with in a 1000 feet below you. Dont fly in the RED and be very careful in the YELLOW.

Back in the saddle

Greetings once again from the hot and humid jungles of Peru. Since being back over the last three weeks I have been flying quite a bit. After a brief few days in Lima getting my pilot license squared away, I was able to do some recurrency training in the SAMAIR floatplane. The following week I already had three flights.
One of the flights was the pick up two missionaries that were preparing for a visit by a medical team in late September. Since there was extra room on the flight, I took along another SAM missionary who works in Pucallpa. He was surprised at how smooth the air was and at how cool and refeshing it was up at 6500 feet. 65 degrees and 140 miles per hour for one hour sure is nice compared to 95 degrees at 15 miles per hour for a whole day in a small boat!


Special thanks to Tim for the use of his pictures.