The MAF Blog: Worldwide Pulse

Posts Tagged ‘Ecuador’

Surviving Rainy, Swampy Air Strips

Posted on: May 17th, 2012 by Brian Shepson | Leave a comment

Nobody likes to get stranded when they are traveling by plane. A cancelled flight or mechanical failure can be frustrating beyond belief, especially when we simply want to get home to a loved one. When you are a missionary pilot flying in the jungle, those frustrations still exist.

I once went to pick up a missionary who had been serving in Ecuador for 30 years. The rainfall was so intense the previous night that the water rolled off his tin roof in one continuous, corrigated sheet for hours. With such rainfalls, getting in and out of these areas require precision, patience and careful examination.

So how do jungle pilots determine the safety of the strip’s surface while still circling overhead?

Mission Aviation Fellowship Papua Indonesia

Sheets of rain like this in Papua create spectacular rainbows, but that same water isn’t so great for grass and dirt airstrips.

One of the techniques pilots use to accomplish this is by approaching the strip at such an angle that you can catch a reflection off the standing water. Once you’ve determined that there is water, you have to next determine how deep it is. I have radioed down to the air strip and asked people to walk through the puddles to determine their depth or watched animals cross the air strip to see if they remain on top of the ground.

A soft airstrip can grab your tires and flip your plane in a split second. It’s not something you want to happen to your plane. Ruts can be even worse, forcing you off the air strip as you’re landing and sending you careening into a ditch nearby or into trees surrounding the strip.

And none of these observations are worth much if you can’t see the air strip – which is a real problem when you’re flying in the rain. Whenever rain drops cover a windshield, the rain drops wreak havoc on your depth perception. We teach our pilots to rock their head from side to side as they approach air strips to avoid this problem, enabling them to clearly perceive their depth of vision.

Observing donkeys crossing the air strip, rocking your head back and forth, and assessing an air strip’s viability for landing from the air – it’s all in a day’s work for a jungle pilot.

When Popping Off is Necessary

Posted on: May 10th, 2012 by Gene Jordan | Leave a comment

When I joined MAF in 1977, the training department was teaching pilots how to execute a “flap pop-off.” This technique allowed the airplane to “unstick” itself and get flying at a very slow speed when trying to take-off from an extremely muddy airstrip…a trick that became quite useful when I flew in Ecuador.

The Amazon jungle in eastern Ecuador gets between 24 and 28 FEET of rain a year, and the rain-soaked grass and dirt airstrips often hampered the ability to gain much speed on the ground in order to take off. A flap pop-off was occasionally just the right trick that helped lift the plane into the air when mud didn’t want to let go.

Most airplanes have flaps, small airfoils that increase the lift of the wings at slow speeds. Normally flaps are extended appropriately for take-off, before the take-off run is started. With a flap “pop-off,” the flaps are extended abruptly, immediately increasing the lift of the wing,

(a) and in conjunction with ground effect lift, the airplane was popped right into the air. Hence the name of the “flap pop-off.”

(b) with the airplane popping right into the air. Hence the name of the “flap pop-off.”

One afternoon I was flying family physician Dr. Jack Olinger out of a water-saturated, muddy air strip in Ecuador – and taking off here wasn’t going to be easy. If ever the flap pop-off technique was necessary, this situation was it.

Piloting a Cessna 180, with large, lift-enhancing and manually-controlled flaps, I rolled down the airstrip once to determine just how much speed I might be able to gain on the ground. Once I was satisfied that I could employ the flap pop-off technique safely to get us into the air, we began splashing down the airstrip again.

At just the right moment, I jerked the flap lever up and we jumped into the air. The nose of the airplane had to be carefully lowered to gain speed, without touching down again. I think that this maneuver surprised Dr. Olinger, as it was a non-standard maneuver. As we established a solid climb rate and rose over the jungle trees, Dr. Jack said that “this was so much fun,” and “could we land and do it again?” – a request I politely declined.

In most newer planes, electronically-powered flaps render flap pop-offs useless, but in the Cessna 180 and 185 they sure came in handy at the right time and in the right place!

Flying in Ecuador: A Fishy Tale

Posted on: May 3rd, 2012 by Brian Shepson | Leave a comment

When you fly into remote villages in the jungles of Ecuador, you get all kinds of requests to transport unique objects. So I didn’t think much of the request of two local fishermen to transport a fish they had caught in the massive Pastaza River.

After asking me if I could wait while they fetched the fish, the pair returned five minutes later carrying a vagre (or catfish) weighing about 300 pounds! The fish’s head – carried on one fisherman’s back with his hands over his head in the gills – was about two and a half feet wide. Its whiskers were wider than my arm span. The other fisherman was doing all he could to hold up the remaining weight of the six-foot-long fish by hoisting up the slippery tail fin.

There was just enough room to squeeze the fish into the cargo pod beneath the airplane. However, the fish was still alive. Throughout my flight back to Shell, the fish thrashed about in the pod with such veracity that it caused the plane to shake from side to side.

Once we finally landed, some of the workers at the hangar cleaned the fish and cut up fillets to be sold locally. It was incredibly delicious.

2011 In Pictures – Mission Aviation Fellowship Delivers …

Posted on: December 5th, 2011 by MAF | 3 Comments

Medevac flight for stroke patient, Kalimantan. Photo by Tripp Flythe.

Food delivery with the Kodiak, Kalimantan. Photo by Dave Forney.

Pilot Nathan Fagerlie delivers supplies and teachers for first-ever school in Pogamba village, Papua. Photo by Steve Richards.

Soccer teams lined up during Indonesia’s Independence Day celebration as MAF Caravan departs Pa’Upan, Kalimantan. Photo by Dave Forney.

Celebrating the Lani language Bible delivery in Papua. Photo by Nathan Fagerlie.

MAF Medevac Flight in Ecuador. Photo by Chad Irwin.

Fighting measles – vaccine deliveries in WDRC. Photo by Tim Chase.

MAF pilot Jon Cadd assists John Ngayo of OEIL upon arrival in Lubutu, DRC. Photo by LuAnne Cadd.

Fighting cholera in Bilobo, WDRC. Photo by Nate Birkemo.

Medevac of an 18-year-old girl with heart troubles in Kalimantan. Photo courtesy of Sean Cannon.

Chicks in flight with MAF pilot David Harms, Haiti. Photo by Will White.

Celebrating the arrival of the first Majang New Testament Talking Bible in February 2011 with the Hoekstra family, Ethiopia. Photo courtesy of Denny Hoekstra.

To learn more about the impact that the Hoekstra missionary family has had in Ethiopia, read the 2011 Spring addition of FlightWatch, page 3.

A Slice of Americana from the Jungle, Part 1 of 3

Posted on: October 14th, 2011 by Jason Chatraw |

Last fall when I visited the MAF affiliate program in Ecuador for the dedication of the renovated Nate Saint House, I went on the most hallowed weekend of the college football season for my beloved Bulldogs – the week of the Georgia-Florida football game. And while I knew I would have to miss watching the game for the first time in nearly 30 years, I was OK with it. Seeing the house that Nate Saint built and traveling into the jungle to meet the tribes he helped was far more exciting than watching the Gators beat my Bulldogs into oblivion.

However, the morning of the game, I awoke in the guest house where I was staying to the sound of two unfamiliar voices speaking in a very familiar dialect – I knew they were Southerners. And not only that, it sounded like the North Georgia variety. I grew up in the South and their slow drawls filling the kitchen air made me miss home – and college football.

I got out of bed, introduced myself and asked the two new house guests a most important question: “Are you guys Dawg fans?” To which I immediately received affirmative responses: “You know it!” We woofed together.

Florida Gator fan, Megan Shepherd, standing with Georgia Bulldog fan, Jason Chatraw

I met Florida alum Megan Shepherd, a teacher at an orphanage in Shell, on the day of the Georgia-Florida game.

It was nice to know that I would have two fellow Georgia fans to console me after we would eventually lose to Florida because, well, that’s what happens almost every year. Later that day, we all huddled around the computer, listening to the intermittent broadcast streamed by a slow Internet connection. Thousands of miles away from home on the cusp of the Amazon rain forest, we listened to radio play-by-play announcer Scott Howard’s soothing voice detail all the action. He gave us hope; Georgia had a chance. We jumped up and down and high-fived. Then we had our hearts ripped out. Florida won in overtime.

It really felt like home when I went out to dinner later that evening where one of the women joining us was a Florida alum – and I had to endure the shame of losing once again to the Gators.

Over the years, I’ve led a handful of teams on missions trips, and I’ve always thought about what it would be like to completely remove myself from the American sports scene. As a former sports writer and avid sports fan, I also wondered how difficult it was for MAF missionaries on the field to give up that slice of Americana. So, I decided to find out for myself, interviewing some MAF missionaries – who also happen to be football fans – on this subject.

Over the next two Fridays, check back in to read about the creative ways MAF missionaries follow their favorite football teams – and what it’s like to cheer on your team 12,000 miles away from home.