You'll land to dancing and chanting and gifts of live chickens.
Lukla, a strip of tarmac that sheers off the edge of a narrow valley in Nepal's Himalayas, is widely considered the world's most dangerous airport. But for bush pilot Matt Dearden, who flies the rugged and often uncharted terrain of Indonesian New Guinea, landing on muddy ridgelines and vertiginous, hand-dug slopes, Lukla holds no fear.
"Lukla's a piece of cake," he said. "It's a big tarmac runway. It's pretty long. Some of the stuff we fly to goes up to about a 30% incline, which is ridiculously steep – you'd struggle to drive a Land Rover up it."
Dearden's background is far from the daredevil history one might expect of a pilot who sometimes flies equipped only with a hand-drawn map. He has a degree in computer science and worked as a programmer in Bristol for eight years.
"I did enjoy doing it until about four years in," he recalled. "I got very bored of Monday to Friday, nine to five, and thought I'd learn to fly aeroplanes."
Two lessons in, his instructors told him he could make a career out of flying. And, with his sights set on a European airline, perhaps easyJet or Ryanair, Dearden embarked on the gruelling professional training.
The conventional route to a commercial pilot's licence – a full-time, 18-month programme of study – was never an option financially. "I did a modular route," he said. "You can take as long as you like within some limits and spread it out over three or four years while holding down a full-time job."
Like many aspiring pilots, Dearden moved in with his parents and rented out his flat to fund his professional exams and costly flying practice. "I'd come home from work, have dinner, hit the books," he says. "It was solid."
But when he finally qualified, four years later, jobs were thin on the ground. "I sent out hundreds of applications to anyone with an aeroplane," he said. "I got very few replies and they all said: 'We're not recruiting anyone with 200-odd hours, straight out of flight school.'"
It's a pretty butt-clenching experience when something runs out [in front of the plane]
Although he would have struggled to place Indonesia on a map, he applied for an opportunity with the nation's Susi Air. On a Sunday, out of the blue, he received an email asking him to start in 10 days.
The boss of his small company, which had just seven staff, was remarkably understanding. So Dearden worked one last week, booked flights to Jakarta, packed what he could into a bag and began navigating Indonesia's storm-swept, tropical skies.
Many of Indonesia's 17,000-odd islands are home to tiny communities isolated from the rest of the nation by distance or terrain, making access to schools, markets, government offices and even medical care almost impossible. So the government runs heavily subsidised pioneer flights to connect some of these remote outposts to the wider world. Dearden began flying these routes and, while working in New Guinea, fell in love with a plane: the nine-seater, three-wheeled Pilatus Porter.
"It's a proper pilot's aircraft. You've only got one pilot on board so you're your own commander," he said. "It's known among pilots as this beast of an aircraft that can land on anything you want to call an airstrip and descend through the smallest gap in the clouds. It's just a delight to fly."
After a few months of survey flights, he progressed to carrying passengers and cargo to and from isolated highland villages. New Guinea's terrain is so savagely corrugated that a short intra-village hop might take just a couple of minutes yet spare locals days of burdened walking.
"It's amazing how trees can grow on such steep slopes," Dearden says. "There's often raging rivers at the bottom of them and they build these vine bridges which aren't the safest. So if you get a plane that hops over the valley or even over the peak and to the next valley it can save a lot of time and effort."
Airstrip building in Indonesian New Guinea's interior, where people lived without the wheel or metal and had minimal contact with outsiders until around 70 years ago, is a communal effort. Villagers, many of whom will never have seen a plane, work together to clear and sculpt landing strips, a process that can take many years: the first flight into a village is a spectacular event for locals.
"You'll land and everyone will dance and chant and run around the aeroplane, shaking your hands," Dearden said. "There'll be a presentation where they all sit down – you'll usually fly in some kind of official to make an official opening – and they'll give gifts varying from net bags to live chickens. The chickens are quite a big honour."
Taking off with such brand new fliers, many of whom have never travelled in any kind of vehicle, can present its challenges. Villagers sit on the ground, so are unfamiliar with the concept of seats, let alone seat belts. While some embrace flying with serenity, others spend the entire journey hysterical with fear.
The airstrips themselves can be a hurdle. It's not uncommon for the 2.5 ton plane to get stuck in muddy patches and for the entire village to team up to dig it out. As open space, the village airstrip also becomes a focus for community living, from markets through to football matches, not to mention a magnet for dogs, pigs and chickens.
"A lot of those runways you're going in and you're already too tight because of the shape of the valley to abort the landing, so it's a pretty butt-clenching experience when something runs out [in front of the plane]," Dearden said.
But the rewards are worth it. "The magical [flights] are the sunrise departures," he said. "You're getting airborne and it's twilight between night and day. You push up through a small cloud layer and all the mountains are lit with this warm light with a blanket of white below you. Puncak Jaya is a snow-capped mountain at 16,000 feet in the tropics – it's amazing."
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