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Hangar Happenings

Catching up on what's going on around here. Yesterday the guys made three flights out to the Waorani sector--not sure exactly which communities. They took out some college students who are in Ecuador to look at missions, be involved in missions, get a vision for missions. We always consider it a part of our ministry to make these kinds of flights, because it's a way to be an instrument to get people headed in the directions of foreign missions.

The engine is on HC-BQV as of Monday afternoon. That's the plane that was damaged on landing in Kuakash earlier this year. It stands a decent chance of being ready to fly again in January. Work has stopped on that for now, and the mechanics are focusing on HC-BMO, which is out of hours, and needs an inspection before it can fly again.

The Kelley family is returning to Shell tomorrow. They've been in the US for the past couple weeks to be with Curtis's dad, who had major heart surgery. They were to be back in Shell by today, but the plane wasn't able to land in Quito on Monday night due to weather, and instead had to divert to Guayaquil. Then there was also the question about whether or not the road would be open, as there was that paro going on since Friday or Saturday. All traffic that had to go from Quito to Shell was going through Baeza and Tena, and longer route, and therefore more costly. At any rate, they have a ride down to Shell on Thursday, and the paro is now over. It will be good to have Curtis back as a mechanic again.

I've been working on a database that will in in flight planning and scheduling. I don't know the program at all, so that's been slow going. I'm going to e-mail someone in the US who uses the program extensively and see if they might lend a hand. The servers are continuing to function well, with no major problems, and that's always a good thing. Oh, let me take that back. We been having a rain storm the last half hour, with some scattered lightning. One strike was within a half mile, and the power went off for five minutes. I was deciding whether to shut down the computers due to risk of damage from the lightning, when my UPS cut out. I've got to see what happened there, because it should last a lot longer than a couple minutes. I've got ten batteries in the system.