Ten year old Elijah from Gulargambone has ADHD. The whole family visited the Family Unit at Westmead Children's Hospital for assessment in order to ascertain the best mode of treatment for Elijah. With his condition, a nine hour train/road trip is impractical. Also, as the whole family needed to participate, travel costs were prohibitive for this single parent family.

Gary Weeks - Pilot

Angel flight 1 by Gary Weeks
This is Gary's 7th mission. Previous mission for Gary - M508 AF2.

Comment by Gary

"Today was as it turned out a shocker as far as going flying. Especially
as it was the first time any of my passengers had ever flown in any
aircraft at all.

On my way out to Coonamble it was a reasonable ride but a very slow trip
due to strong head winds so I had plenty of time to fix myself a brew as
I was covering the ground very slowly.

I arrived into Coonamble at about 0945 and the family were awaiting my arrival. The kids were very keen to get in to the aircraft but I got them all back out to take a couple of shots and also to enable me to load the bags.

Dad is a very large man and struggled initially to climb aboard the
aircraft but was soon loaded and strapped in with some help from my
extension seat belt. I was able to seat Katherine (youngest) next to dad
in the centre row and she was pretty excited about going flying in the
plane. Elijah was then comfortably seated in the back row of seats and
like dad seemed a little apprehensive about this mode of travel.

My co-pilot was Michelle who loved the flight except for some of the
really rough bits which is understandable because it really was a
shocker of a day. She asked many interesting questions and I had her
trying to communicate with Elijah who was pretty frightened and cried
for the first 30 mins or so of the trip. Katherine seemed to travel
pretty well although she didn't enjoy the bumps after a while either and
I think was happy to get out of the aircraft once we were back on the
ground at Bankstown.

The flight home to Bankstown started off quite smooth at 9000' but we
had no help from the strong wind as it had swung further into the South.
As we headed east the cloud tops came up to meet us and it wasn't until
we were east of Bathurst that it became really rough and we had to
descend due to icing which didn't help the turbulence. The temperature at
9000' on the way home was -3 Celsius which was a lot colder than a
couple of hours earlier where it was + 6 Celsius at 8000' so conditions
were changing rapidly. There was a series of very vigorous fronts
passing through NSW with Sydney and surrounding areas experiencing extremely windy conditions today."

Katherine in the hot pink, Mel, Elijah, and Michelle.

Steve Penfold - Pilot

David Adkins - Co-pilot

Angel flight 2 by Steve Penfold Australian Civil Air Patrol
This is Steve's 1st mission.
Previous mission for AusCAP M291 AF1.