Eight Passengers Made It Out

The answer was, politely but firmly, no.

So what we know about what actually happens in the highlands comes in fragments, from aid workers, from missionaries, from the occasional researcher who gets a permit.

Los periodistas no pueden entrar fácilmente.

Journalists cannot enter easily.

Which means, for a traveler, for anyone thinking about Papua, the information gap is enormous.

You can visit parts of coastal Papua.

The city of Jayapura is accessible, there's tourism infrastructure there.

But the highlands, the places where this pilot was flying, those are an entirely different world, and the conflict makes them more so.

No es un lugar para turistas normales.

It is not a place for normal tourists.

No, it really isn't.

And I don't mean that dismissively toward the region.

Papua is, by many accounts, one of the most culturally rich places on earth.

Hundreds of distinct languages.

Societies with unbroken traditions going back further than most of the cultures I've reported on.

The isolation that makes it dangerous is also the reason it survived.

Papua tiene muchas lenguas.

Papua has many languages.

Muchas culturas diferentes.

Many different cultures.

Octavio, let me ask you something.

When you think about places that are hard to reach, places that require a bush plane or a boat or a four-day walk, does that make you more curious about them or does it put you off?

Me da más curiosidad.

It makes me more curious.

Pero también miedo.

But also afraid.

Both at once, yeah.

That's probably the honest answer for most people.

And I think that tension is what this story actually surfaces.

Because there are thousands of communities around the world, not just in Papua, that depend entirely on small aircraft.

Parts of Alaska, the Canadian north, the Amazon, northern Mozambique.

And the people who fly those routes are doing something almost invisible to the rest of us.

Son como un taxi del cielo.

They are like a sky taxi.

Taxi del cielo, I love that.

That's exactly what they are.

And when that taxi gets shot down, the whole community loses its connection to the outside world.

Medicine doesn't arrive.

People who need surgery can't leave.

The next generation that wants to study somewhere has no way out.

Sin el avión, el pueblo está solo.

Without the plane, the village is alone.

Completely alone.

And here's the thing about the West Papua National Liberation Army's logic in attacking planes.

It's not random.

These aircraft are associated with Indonesian state presence.

With missionaries who, in the eyes of some independence fighters, represent cultural erasure.

With the economic infrastructure that benefits Jakarta more than the local population.

The attack is political, even if the target is a civilian pilot just doing a job.

Los rebeldes no quieren Indonesia en Papua.

The rebels do not want Indonesia in Papua.

That's right.

And this is a conflict that's been grinding on for over fifty years with very little international attention.

Indonesia is a major economy, a significant geopolitical partner for the US and Australia both.

There's enormous incentive not to make too much noise about what happens in the highlands.

The press restrictions exist partly because of that.

El mundo no habla mucho de Papua.

The world does not talk much about Papua.

Almost not at all.

And that's a failure I feel personally.

When I was at the AP and then at the magazine, we covered Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis, during the Bali bombings, during the tsunami.

Papua was always the story we couldn't quite get to.

Too remote, too restricted, too complicated to explain in 800 words.

El piloto americano tenía una familia.

The American pilot had a family.

Es muy triste.

It is very sad.

It is.

And we don't know much about him yet.

What we do know is that he was operating in one of the most hostile environments for civilian flight on earth, and he knew that going in.

People who take those jobs know.

They're not naive.

But knowing the risk and having it arrive anyway, those are two different things.

Es difícil volar en un lugar con guerra.

It is difficult to fly in a place with war.

From a traveler's perspective, I want to address this directly.

If you're planning a trip to Papua, or honestly to any remote region with an active insurgency, there are three things worth knowing.

First: government travel advisories exist for a reason.

They're not always right, but they aggregate information you can't easily get yourself.

Second: local knowledge is irreplaceable.

Tour operators based in Jayapura or Manokwari will know which areas are genuinely dangerous week to week.

Third: the infrastructure assumption you make at home doesn't apply.

En Papua no hay hospital cerca.

In Papua there is no nearby hospital.

No hay carretera.

There is no road.

Exactly.

If something goes wrong in Highland Papua, the same small plane that got you there is your emergency exit, and that plane may not be available.

That calculation changes everything about how you prepare.

It's not pessimism, it's just reality.

Pero hay personas que viven allí.

But there are people who live there.

Para ellos es normal.

For them it is normal.

That's the most important thing you've said.

The danger isn't the landscape or the culture.

It's the political situation imposed from outside.

Papuan Highland communities have managed the terrain for generations.

What they haven't signed up for is being caught in the crossfire of an independence war that the Indonesian state refuses to resolve through dialogue.

Los papúas no tienen mucha voz en el mundo.

The Papuans do not have much voice in the world.

Very little.

And the irony is that the same remoteness that makes Papua so extraordinary as a destination also makes it easy to ignore.

Out of sight, out of the news cycle, out of diplomatic agendas.

The pilot who died this week was one of the few visible threads connecting that world to the outside, and now that thread is gone.

Me pregunto cómo llegan ahora.

I wonder how they get there now.

Sin el avión.

Without the plane.

Another pilot will take over.

That's how it always works in these communities.

There's a whole ecosystem of small operators, charities, missionary organizations, and private contractors who rotate through.

But there's a gap now, and in places with no roads, a gap in air service is a gap in everything.

Fletcher, una pregunta.

Fletcher, a question.

¿Tú tienes miedo en el avión pequeño?

Are you afraid in small planes?

Every single time.

I've been on a Cessna in northern Kenya where the pilot just pointed at a dirt track and said, that's where we land.

I gripped the seat so hard I left marks.

And yet I'd do it again tomorrow because there's no other way to get to certain stories.

That trade-off is real for anyone who travels seriously.

Sí.

Yes.

Algunos viajes son difíciles.

Some journeys are difficult.

Pero son importantes.

But they are important.

Octavio, I noticed you used the word "aterrizar" a minute ago.

To land.

And it occurred to me that it's a word learners probably see all the time in airports but might not know how it's built.

Sí.

Yes.

"Aterrizar" viene de "tierra".

'Aterrizar' comes from 'tierra.' The plane touches the earth.

El avión toca la tierra.

So it's literally to earth something, to bring it down to ground.

That's elegant.

In English we say to land, which comes from the same root idea, the land, the ground, but we've lost the sense of it somehow.

Aterrizar keeps it right there in the word.

También decimos "tierra" para el planeta.

We also say 'tierra' for the planet.

Y para el suelo.

And for the ground.

Es la misma palabra.

It is the same word.

That's one of those moments where Spanish seems to have its logic more honestly on the surface than English does.

Tierra does all that work: the ground you walk on, the planet you live on, the thing a plane has to find at the end of every flight.

One word carrying all of that.

Y el piloto de Papua no pudo volver a la tierra.

And the pilot of Papua could not return to earth.

En ningún sentido.

In any sense.

That's a line I'm going to sit with for a while.

Thanks for this one, Octavio.