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Air Cargo Hawaii


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My pilot doesn't fly at night. Most airports in Hawaii don't have lights, and he is afraid of the dark anyway :D

Get a new one :) The night shift is great money!

Better still!, get another two and put them on Continental shifts ;)

Just saying...

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Do you get more money for going further ?

Never noticed TBH, type of cargo does though, trips carrying cell phones are worth a lot more than a load of chickens (must be why mr SAD is so poor :P )

Joke!.........Why did mr SAD cross the road?............(too get to the chicken on the other side!)..... :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Cheer's...Graham...

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5/11/2012

There is no such thing as a coincidence...

After a couple of hectic days things are finally settling down a bit. This gives me the opportunity to update you on things happening :)

As I said before, I have a new pilot, Elliot. He has been flying both the 206 and 172 lately. Today however, he was on a trip east on the 172 and I was making a trip west in the 206 a few hours later. I knew we were scheduled to land back at Dillingham somewhere around the same time. And as if it was planned from the start, just as I was contacting Dillingham traffic I heard a familiar tail number and a familiar voice over the radio announcing the intention to land at Dillingham on a visual approach :D

In the end I was just behind Elliot landing and even had to slow down a bit, because of my faster 206. I managed to snap a quick picture on final. You can just make out the 172 taxi light on the right of the runway.

tandemlanding.jpg

And to make good on a promise I made a few days ago. Finally some pictures of the repainted 172. Some of the details are different from the 206. Hope you like it. :)

I took the last one from the roof of the Dillingham tower. Off course I got permission to do so by the airport manager :cool:

172_1.jpg

172_2.jpg

172_3.jpg

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Looks like the 172 is going to do some loops (dare you to try it) hehe STALL!

Hahaha, the 172 is sooooooooo underpowered it can barely climb at all, let alone go vertical :P

The 206 can probably do it though! :cool:

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5/15/2012

Mayor changes!

After a very busy period running Air Cargo International Group I am finally back to make some important announcements about changes to the company:

- Air Cargo Hawaii is very proud to announce the acquisition of a third airplane for the fleet. After lengthy negotiations I have managed to find a completely refurbished Cessna 210M on mainland U.S.A. and have it crated and shipped to Hawaii. It arrived at Lihue a couple of days ago and had been rebuild and flown to HQ at Dillingham.

The airplane is a 1980 Cessna 210M Centurion II with the optional turbocharged 310hp TSIO-520-R engine. It has comparable specifications to that of the U206G Stationair, but has a retractable landing gear which gives it a higher cruise speed. This has the disadvantage that the useful cargo load is slightly smaller at about 980 lbs. I feel however that the higher top speed is preferable for time sensitive contracts and that it complements the other aircraft in the fleet perfectly.

The 210 has been extensively refurbished and has a very modern avionics package with Garmin GNS430 and GNS530 units and a Bendix-King KFC-225 autopilot. As bought the aircraft is in factory new condition.

Off course the aircraft has been repainted in the, by now, familiar Air Cargo Hawaii livery, which can be seen in the attached pictures made after arrival at Dillingham.

As always, local mechanic Dave at the controls checking out the avionics.

210_1.jpg

210_2.jpg

210_3.jpg

210_4.jpg

210_5.jpg

- To get the best use out of all three aircraft it was necessary to hire an extra pilot. After consulting with my current part-time employee Elliot, he recommended a guy named Anthony. Anthony is also a very experienced ex- commercial airline pilot like Elliot. He wanted to come work full-time which is great. I am going to put him to work on the 172S and get Elliot to fly the U206G on a permanent basis.

- You can almost guess it, but the extra personnel and aircraft means more paperwork, which I hate! <_<

I can't handle it all and keep flying at the same time. This led me to hire my buddy John's daughter Melissa as office manager/planner at our corporate headquarters at Dillingham. She is just out of college on the mainland and recently returned to Hawaii to find work. For the time being I will still sign of on all planning work and teach her the business. It is my hope that Melissa will run the office part of the company on her own in the near future :)

To make room for her office and the ever expanding storage, I secured the rent of the adjacent unit on the tarmac at Dillingham. Doubling the available space will give us some breathing room for the moment...

As you can see, a lot of changes in a very short time. The big challenge for Air Cargo Hawaii will be to keep offering the same, or even higher, level of service to our customers. The service is what sets us apart from the rest, which secures our place among the freight businesses operating on Hawaii. To accomplish that I like to hire only people I know or people highly recommended to me by people I know! I like to run the business as a family and treat the customers in the same way :thum:

Only thing remaining to say is to welcome Anthony and Melissa and wish them a bright future at the company! :D

I will sign off with a picture I took this afternoon approaching Dillingham into the late afternoon sun. This was also my last flight in the 206 for the foreseeable future as I will move on to the 210.

If you look very careful you can see my house between the top of the dash and the Dillingham runway threshold :cool:

goodbye206.jpg

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Oh jeez, I am already regretting purchasing an aircraft with all those new avionics... :P

I up to my ears in manuals for the Garmin and Bendix-King systems :wacko2:

I hope I am able to made an afternoon run towards Lanai in my new airplane :cool:

Respectfully,

Menno

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Thank you both for the positive responses! Always good to hear :D

@UKJim,

I don't have a hangar yet. The storage units at Dillingham could fit a Cessna in theory, but I need the room for other things...

Large jets will be a problem. Strangely Dillingham has a 9000 feet runway, but you can't park anything larger than a Cessna 206 or 207. Even a 208 would be problematic. If it were ever to come to expansion to multi-engine props or even jets, I would have to move the whole operation to a bigger airport, with increasing cost...

Alternatively, I would have to ask the owner of Dillingham, the U.S. Army for permission to extend the parking facilities, but I fear that would be even more costly than moving :(

Anyways, for the moment we are fine. I still have to buy out the lease on the 206 :)

Respectfully,

Menno

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Very nice update Menno. Good to see the business expanding though it will definitely mean more admin time which I know you love :P

Super job on the repaints, I wish I had more time (and knowledge) to do more thorough repaints myself.

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Congrats on your new purchase, she looks great. Good move on hiring a girl friday to lessen the load on that pesky paperwork. :thum: More time for you to just hang loose too!. :D

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5/21/2012

Just an update! :)

It has been a good week for us at Air Cargo Hawaii. The new employees Anthony and Melissa are doing fine and are really earning their pay.

We have been doing a lot of jobs around the islands. Air Cargo Hawaii used to service the western islands of Oahu and Kauai for most of the time, but with the addition of the 210M we have been making more and more trips east, expanding our client base.

I hired yet another pilot. I didn't really plan on it, but I think it is a good choice. The guy is named Jared and he is very young and inexperienced, but is showing a lot of talent. I put him in the care of both senior pilots, Anthony and Elliot to learn and make flying hours in the Cessna's. Jared is another local, so he is already familiar with the land (and sea).

I finally managed to crape together enough money to buy the rented 206 from the Princeville Corp. This reduces the overhead significantly, which is always a good thing :thum:

This also makes it possible to upgrade the ancient avionics, but I think I will have a hard time convincing its pilot Elliot of that :P

The new 210 proves to be a handful to fly. I really have to get used to it I guess. It is a lot less forgiving on approach and landing than the other Cessna's I have flown before. The 210 has the nasty tendency to drop out of the air at low speeds during landing. And flying a little fast makes it almost impossible to land. It just keeps floating until it drops like a brick. It just takes a little getting used to...

I did manage to make an automatic ILS approach on PHOG today. I screwed up the manual landing, but up until the last 300 ft everything went smoothly on the AP :cool:

I took some pictures on the return trip, which I hope you will like. The first is of Oahu flying in from the east. The second is on landing at DIllingham. As you can see I was just in time before the sun set. Anthony actually came in from the west 5 minutes later in the 172 and it was almost dark then!

Too bad about the clouds though. Kind of ruins the photo's :(

Oahusunset.jpg

Oahusunset2.jpg

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5/25/2012

Going vertical!

Bought myself a Bell 206B JetRanger today :)

It was a complete impulse buy, but the offer was too good to be true. Got it second hand from a local tour operator at a great discount. They had it mothballed recently due to smaller numbers of tourists.

The reason for buying a helicopter was that I was receiving increasingly many requests for contracts to remote private and public heliports not accessible by fixed wing airplanes. I was losing out on a lot of money by not being able to accept them...

I got it working right away with a temporary helicopter pilot I got on loan from the same tour operator. It has so many jobs that it won't be finished with the first batch for another 26 hours :D

... and that's only the available work from Dillingham to Mau'i power plant (PH90) and back.

More on the JetRanger later...

I was actually planning another expansion to the company. They are working on it at the Cessna factory right now, but I won't say any more until the contracts are finalized :P

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Looking good there mate! I like the Eurocopter EC-135 by Nemeth Designs if you are looking for a decent payware chopper that is nice easy to fly and startup too.

Something shiny coming from cessna - looking forward for the reveal. I think it could be a grand caravan but we will see. Carenado do a sweet grand caravan with a cargo expansion the Cargomaster

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