By James Wynbrandt

You expect commercial pilots operating in the bush to face certain occupational challenges: Unimproved airstrips. Mechanical problems encountered in remote locations. Lack of navaids and weather reports. But for one class of bush pilot, such hazards don’t always top the list of dangers.

“During the Ebola outbreak in October of ’07 we went into the hot zone two and three times a day,” said David Francis, a Cessna 206 pilot from Memphis, Tenn. who operates out of Ndolo Airport (FZAB) in Kinshasa, the Congo. “Nobody else would fly in there. Even the UN pilots refused. They didn’t want to go into a contagious area. We just see this as firmly within our mission.”

But what kind of mission would require that kind of commitment and potential sacrifice?

Helping relieve suffering,” Francis said. “That’s why God put us here.” The mission, simply put, is mission aviation: pilots, deeply committed to their religious beliefs, flying in support of missionary and humanitarian activities around the globe. In addition to the challenges associated with bush flying, over the years mission aviation pilots have contended with armed insurgencies, government harassment, civil unrest, natural disasters and even death at the hands of indigenous peoples they seek to help.

[NOTE: We are awaiting information on the approximate number of mission aviation organizations, mission aviation pilots and mission aviation aircraft.] Francis flies for the Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF), based in Nampa, Idaho, one of the oldest and largest such organizations. Operating in Africa, Asia and the Americas, its 134 aircraft conducted more than 50,000 flights last year, serving some 3,000 locations, the great majority of them remote and otherwise inaccessible.

“The kind of environment we fly in is hostile, not just in the air and in the airstrips, but in the countries in which our people are based,” said John Boyd, MAF president and himself a former mission aviation pilot. “Most of the time you’re living in situations with no running water, no constant electricity, no telephone, no shops. You have none of the support you would have grown up with here in the U.S.”

MAF’s roots go back to World War II, an outgrowth of prayer meetings held by a small group of pilots operating in the Pacific theater. The gatherings gave rise to the Christian Airmen’s Missionary Fellowship, MAF’s predecessor organization, launched in 1945. That same year the organization bought its first plane, a 1933 Waco, and began missionary work in Mexico.

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