Back in 1992, during my UN mission in Angola to support the Country first free elections, I had to manage a small fleet of aircraft operating from Luena’s airfield in the Province of Moxico.
It was a busy and challenging activity, with lots of constrains and a myriad of solution to overtake the difficulties.
One of the restrictions I faced was the language barrier. Most of the UN rented air assets’ crews were Russian, and they did not speak a word of Portuguese, French or English. However, every morning, after I returned from the coordination meetings at the provincial electoral committee, I had to assign each air crew with their flight orders, telling them where to fly and what to carry in each leg of the flight.
We ended-up establishing a “cartoon” based flight plan format, which was easily understood by everybody. I would draw in a small strip of paper a scheme of arrows, names, numbers, cubes and puppets, such as:
– “ UN#05 21/09/92 – 10 X puppet draw + 5 X cube draw = 150 kg– Luena 08H10 ↑ (arrow up) Ngugi –» (arrow back) Luena↓ (arrow down) // signature (to validate)”
This would translate into:
-“The Helicopter UN 05, on the 21st of September 1992, will carry 10 passengers and a cargo of 5 packages of electoral material which is estimated to weight approximately 150 kilograms; from Luena airfield to Ngugi village. Estimate take-off time from Luena at 08:10. After the deliver return to Luena airfield for a full stop landing”
These were the simple airtasks, for more elaborate patterns my drawings seemed like an abstractionist painting of Volpi.
It looks ridiculous … but it worked … at least in 95% of the flights.
A major difficulty was that, in 1992, the GPS was a new technology and not all Russian helicopter crews were familiar with it. The other limitation was that the available aeronautical charts of Angola were Russian made. Its quality was outstanding … but all the locations were written in Cyrillic, with a Russian interpretation of the how the local names sounded like. That complied us making a table of conversion of all the major Provincial locations from the local nomination into the Russian (Cyrillic) version and had the coordinates to it. For example, Ngugi, in their charts, was written Hгущи.
With the table and my drawing … of they went and the end result was a major success.
OPen samento 