What Bush Flying & A Global Pandemic Taught Me About Life.

The bush flying part of my aviation career was some of the most valuable flying and life experience I’ve ever had. At 19, I didn’t have a hell of a lot of life experience to build on and being sent off to the far reaches of Zimbabwe with the C206 I’d been allocated seemed like the biggest adventure ever! I barely had a Commercial Pilots Licence (CPL) and living out of a tourist resort, responsible for using the 50 hours my aircraft had between maintenance checks to ferry tourists across Lake Kariba and around the Zambezi Valley and the surrounding countryside, was the beginning of a new life chapter. It was the taken-for-granted way to grow new CPLs — in at the deep end.

I was instantly responsible for my aircraft, organising the flying schedule to meet the incoming and outgoing passenger requirements, planning for additional charters when we could fit them in, and keeping myself alive in between all of that. I learned fast to plan for fuel (which was only available at Kariba Airport on the other side of the lake, or at one of the larger airports a few more hours further), to plan timing of flights, to allow for passenger’s inability to pack within the luggage allowance they’d been allocated, and how to politely explain that the wooden giraffe they’d bought wouldn’t fit in the aircraft unless I made kindling out of it…

I learned a lot about people. I learned how…