Nathan & LaNada Tag Reaching out to Tribal Indonesians through Aviation 
This past October I finished up my flight ground school and part of that training was a course on ditching/water survival.
In many of the locations that NTMA services the tribal missionaries there is a lot of flying over water. We learned how to get ourselves and the passengers out of a sinking aircraft if an emergency ditching (landing in the water) took place. Also how to operate our life vests and the life raft, how to handle injuries in the water and how to get injured people into the life raft. We all traveled to Sierra Vista (west of Mcneal) where we rented a public wave pool for an hour and got to put our training in practice. They started up the waves and we all jumped in with uninflated vests and a life raft still in its casing. I was one of the lucky few to be secretly chosen to act like I had a broken arm. We learned how to inflate our vests, stay together amidst the waves and get the life raft inflated. Another guy named Marcos was also pretending to be unconscious so we had to get him in the raft first and then me with my broken arm. Once we were all in the raft unfortunately we had a large leak and had to deal with sealing the leak, keeping the water out and assessing our situation.
Great training and if in the unlikely event I ever have to ditch in the water this kind of training will be invaluable. I am really thankful to be part of an organization like NTMA who is so concerned about our safety and taking the time to train us how to deal with situation like this.
Take a look at our PHOTOS section of this website for more photos of my ditching/water survival course.
Nathan
