The war shut down almost everything. Our host country, Ecuador, and its neighbor, Peru, fought over a portion of their common boundary. Understandably, the Ecuadorian military prohibited all civilian flying, including ours. No food to school kids. No medicine to health promoters. Neither preachers nor teachers to fledgling believers. The worst? No emergency evacuations. The […]
One afternoon I flew slow circles inside Ecuador’s Amazon jungle clouds. Not completely gray, I’d pop in and out of bright sunshine pockets above or narrow holes open downward to treetops a half-mile below. Tantalizing glimpses too small to stay in, but hinting I might accomplish my new mission after all.
Storing liquid time […]
Pebbles scratched the paint. Bigger rocks just turned over in the propeller blast.
But golf- to baseball-sized stones pounded the tail of my airplane. Couldn’t be helped on the gravel strip. Still had to takeoff.
Two boys next to a Cessna 206 at a typical grass airstrip in Ecuador. Photo by Mark and Kelly Hewes.
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Medical evacuation flights really hurt during my first term. Once turned loose with an airplane in the jungle, I felt I had to be both counselor and pilot. During orientation phase I could busy myself preparing the airplane to receive the patient. The instructor pilot handled talking with the village, the family, and supervising gentle […]
As the newest pilot on MAF’s Ecuador program in the late 1980s, advancing God’s Kingdom excited me. Yet, a hold-over from commercial pilot culture still nagged—having and keeping enough of the “Right Stuff” inside.
I paid close attention to Gene Jordan, my checkout pilot, but new information inundated me—tricks of 130 unique airstrips, radio Spanish, hangar […]
Every station on the main radio network reported low ceilings and rain. But our home base, Shell, Ecuador, looked fine sitting high above the jungle. I switched to the older, short-wave network to reach stations sequestered in hidden mountain valleys. My destination, Yaapi, reported rain most of the night, but a clear morning with bright […]