Great Commission Air Blog

I was just thinking tonight how much fun it would be to train new missionary pilots. I have trained a couple, but never to the extent that I am thinking about tonight.

Give me one or two bright young pilots with about 500 hours, commercial rating, instrument rating and some time on his hands and then hand him over to me for about 8 weeks

The FAA and I are great believers in scenario-based training.  Here are a few scenarios I have personal experience with that I could simulate (with a little help) for our new recruits:

• Deadly, no go-around airstrips that offer no options on short final.
• Dying patients in the back screaming at the top of their lungs, bleeding on floor and trying  to force open the cargo door.
• Cruddy weather and tight mountain VFR flying conditions with limited fuel – at max weight.
• Horses, pigs, sheep, dogs and kids – and old ladies – on runways.
• Stakes planted on runways (to hold the horses)
• Big Rocks placed on air strips (used as soccer goals.)
• Cables strung across airstrips (intended to keep drug smugglers out.)
• Drug smugglers, all shot up needing med-evac flights.
• 40 or 50 Spanish speaking soldiers of uncertain origin pointing machine guns at him on the airstrip.
• 2-3 med-evacs, from different airstrips, on the same flight, in one day.
• Really bad weather complicated by dense smoke and low hanging cumulo-granite clouds.
• Bad sleep aggravated by roosters, dogs, buses with loud horns and salsa induced nightmares.
• Chronic underfunding requiring you to support your family on beans, rice and tortillas – without a retirement plan.
• Semi-regular irregularity including semi-chronic diarrhea and other intestinal adventures.
• No toilets.  No running water. No newspaper. No mail. No Police. No rules.  No hanger. No mechanic. No doctor. No dentist. No Gas. No English. No carpeting.
• Bugs the size of your hands.   Mosquitoes that kill.  Caterpillars that sting like hornets, scorpions that fall from the ceiling.
• Friends of your own kids dying of snake bites because their families are afraid of going to the big city and can’t speak or read Spanish.

I am ready to being my class now.  Any takers?

How can we simulate all of this in Michigan? Sounds like fun to me.

This is the grave of George Penner in Huehuetenango.  1947 to 1982.  It says: “The Eternal God is my Refuge”  I found it in the municipal cemetery in the city of Huehuetenango (pronounced way-way-tenango).  George died when he crashed his plane in 1982.  The family used a Cessna 180 or 185 with a cargo pod on the grave marker.  It’s identifier is TG-BEA.

George was a Missionary Pilot with MAF based in the city of Huehuetenango.  His plane crashed in an area near the city of Nebaj, an area I am pretty familiar with as I have flown through there many, many times.

I don’t know why I began to take in interest in missionary pilots who have died in the line of duty in this area – it does seem a bit morbid.

I suppose one of the reasons is that I have known a few of them.  Another was a man by the name of Erv Ashford.  He worked in the Ixcan region just before me and he crashed in April of 2000, very close to the place George did.  Also, Father Bill Woods, a Maryknoll priest that helped to build the villages in the Ixcan region, crashed (or was shot down) in 1976 very close to the same place where both George and Erv crashed.  My mentor, the man the taught me to fly in the Ixcan worked with Bill Woods.  Bill Woods remains are in a crypt in the Catholic Church in Mayalan, our village.  I have been caught in some pretty frightening downdrafts and awful weather in this same area surrounding the mountain pass that leads from the south side of the Cuchumantanes Mountains to the North Side where there is an easy and clear shot to the airstrip in Huehuetenango. Read my “Deadly Mountain” blog entries.

Then there was Mike Hines, a missionary pilot I met several times in Guatemala City.  He crashed and was killed in Honduras.  Seems to me like it was 2005 or 2006 or so.  Our missoinary friends in La Gloria were in a plane that crashed on the airstrip at their village (that we have served frequently) were people died and others badly burned.  There were many others, I am told, whom I have never met or heard of.  I am one of the lucky few, so they say, to really destroy an aircraft in a crash in these mountains and live to tell about it.

This is the caretaker at the cemetery in Huehuetenango.  If you want to find a grave, he can help.  If he doesn’t know where it is, he will call the previous caretaker.  If that man doesn’t know, he will call the previous, previous caretaker.  There is no master list of graves at this place.  You just need to know where your “place” is.

So, here’s to those who have gone before us.  Brave pilots that fly for the glory of God and to help save the lost and the sick and injured and help the poor.  They have poured out their lives in the service of God and humanity.  I salute them.  I would like to write the story of every one of them so that those of use who come after can know them a bit better.  Perhaps that is Another book – for another day.