The MAF Blog: Worldwide Pulse

Posts Tagged ‘missionary pilot’

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!

So Many Reasons to Leave, One Reason to Stay

Posted on: May 9th, 2012 by Jocelyn Frey | Leave a comment

September 26^th 2011 we arrived in Kinshasa, bright eyed and bushy tailed. It feels like I have been here forever and yet also like I just arrived. Next week I will be heading back to Canada to have our first baby!

I am returning home because in the DR Congo, even in the capital city, there is no real way to take care of a mother and baby if anything were to go wrong. So, I am lucky that I have the ability to travel to a country that has safe medical practices; however, my heart hurts for the millions of mothers here that do not have that choice.

Women here are expected to do almost everything. They’re expected to have lots of children, take care of their families, and also go out and make a living. I cannot imagine having that pressure put on me and also having to give birth multiple times in unsafe conditions.

David Burton doing a morning check on one of the MAF airplanes.

It is a very difficult situation here in the Congo, being a country where the culture and country have been destroyed by many wars and much corruption. DR Congo has only truly been out of war for five years, and it still needs so much healing.

MAF has been here in the DRC for the last 50 years, serving many amazing churches and organizations that are working to heal this country. And MAF has stayed true to the calling that God has for us here. It is a very difficult task and we need all the prayer we can get, as the enemy against our souls would love to see us gone from this place. But we have something in us that is much stronger than him. We stand firm on the words of Jesus:

I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” John 16:33

So, as I head home next week and get to speak to my friends and family about the difficulty of life here and how there is so much need sometimes you can feel like you are drowning in it, I will also get to tell them how MAF is a light in a dark place. How we’re committed to staying, because even when things are hard, we know that He has overcome the world. I am so glad that He did and I don’t have to.

Hope Deferred, Help Delivered

Posted on: April 30th, 2012 by Rebecca Cannon | Leave a comment

It was going to be a great Saturday. We were heading to the pool when my husband got the call. There was a woman interior in need of an emergency evacuation. She was having a difficult labor and both her life and the baby’s were at risk if she didn’t get to good medical care fast.

Welcome to the realities of being the family of a missionary pilot “on call.” Since we were already in town, our whole family went directly to the MAF dock/hangar so my husband could talk to the people requesting the flight.

As my three daughters and I waited in the car, I glanced back to see my oldest crying big, silent tears of disappointment. Swimming is one of her very favorite activities. She’d been begging to go for weeks. Finally, a day had come when we thought we could make it happen and she’d been ecstatic. Now, she wasn’t going to get to go swimming after all.

My heart broke for my little girl. For my husband and I, the change of plans was easy to take in stride. We understood the situation––we knew Sean was on call. And we also knew that we were here for the very purpose of helping people like that woman in the jungle. But to our eight-year-old little girl it was yet another disappointment.

Brooklyn and I spent a lot of time talking about how things don’t always go the way we want them to. We talked about that woman and her family hurting out there so far from medical help and how they must be so scared and worried. We talked about how God can use Daddy and his airplane to help and share Jesus’ love with them. We talked about how we can’t be selfish and that opportunities to go swimming will come again. The tears didn’t necessarily subside right away––it was a tough lesson.

We couldn’t swim but we could still have fun. I took my girls home and we pulled out the special tea set. We made scones and even added precious chocolate chips from America. As we gathered around the kitchen table, now dressed in our favorite dresses instead of swimming suits, we smiled at each other and bowed our heads to pray for Daddy as he flew and for the stranger he was on his way to help.

The following weekend (when Sean wasn’t on call) we went swimming!

Nothing Like Mama’s Cookin’

Posted on: February 23rd, 2012 by Jason Chatraw |

Last year, one of the most popular blog posts we shared dealt with unique aviation tips from our missionary pilots. The list included ideas about the best way to handle some of the unique cargo MAF transports, like ducks, snakes and pigs. There was even a blog post last year about crocodiles in the cockpit.

While recently talking with Sean Cannon about his time flying for MAF’s affiliate program in Oaxaca, Mexico, he added another interesting – albeit, not so alive – item to unusual things MAF transports: tortillas.

But it’s not the commercial variety either.

“Sometimes, I would be finishing up loading the plane and a mother would come out to me and ask if I still had any room,” Sean said. “And in her arms, she would be carrying a stack of giant tortillas about a foot high. These tortillas were the diameter of a large pizza. It was like a care package from a mom to her son.”

Apparently, there’s nothing like mama’s cooking – especially her tortillas.

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