Prepared for takeoff

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Thursday, October 28th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: advances in aviation technology.

During this summer’s airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Christian missionary organizations unveiled new ideas in research and smartphone applications.

WORLD correspondent Hayley Schoeppler has the story.

HAYLEY SCHOEPPLER, REPORTER: Missionary aviation involves two key components: small airplanes and remote jungle airstrips.

And making those landing sites isn’t easy. Jeff Werley is an aviation representative with Ethnos 360, the mission sending agency formerly known as New Tribes Mission.

WERLEY: As we have moved from region to region, even on the same island, building an airstrip is difficult because of factors like there's trees that need to be removed. So who do we ask if we can remove the trees? Maybe we meet a man that comes out of the jungle that says it's my property, you can do whatever you want. But maybe he doesn't own that property. Usually they'll ask for pay. How do we know we pay the right person? Is it his property? There's no deed. So how do we know?

In the Philippines, Ethnos 360 has come up with some creative solutions to those problems.

WERLEY: We went to helicopters. In the Philippines, they play a lot of basketball. There's basketball courts, in most of the villages that we have surveyed, and we’re able to land a little helicopter on the basketball court.

Remote airstrips raise other problems, too, like the need for accurate mapping. Zach Soles works with Indigenous People's Technology and Education Center

SOLES: We actually use an app to do the mapping. We've been collaborating to create the airstrip mapping program. We take a quadcopter drone, take general pictures, and we actually map an airstrip. So we can create a 3D map for these missionary aviators.

Soles says that’s a much quicker process than before.

SOLES: Typically, what a pilot will do is they'll go out and survey an airstrip with old-school surveying tools. So that's a transom. They're seeing the slope, they're seeing, you know, where the pressures are, there's a rock here, they'll take a big measuring tape and measure it all out. What we're able to do is actually take real time imagery, to where now all they have to do is take that back, maybe they'll do some manual surveying, but now they can take that back to the office, sit down with a cup of coffee, and create a 3D rendered map. . .

Craig Russell also works with technology as the vice president of transportation services at JAARS. It’s a sending organization that works with missionary aviation and supports Bible translation. Working with pilots on the field, JAARS has created a comprehensive app that helps pilots prepare for their flights, covering runway surveys, weight and balance, distances, and fuel burn. It also allows pilots to log their “notices to airmen” or "NO TAMS." These are notes about remote airstrips that could affect a plane landing —from fallen trees to tall grass.

Before the app, pilots relied on a clipboard to log and later manually enter those notes. Russell says now they have an easier way to communicate.

RUSSELL: The world is changing so fast and technology is changing. And and and really leveraging that to make our transportation more effective. there's a software that we're developing in partnership with our field partner called Flight span, a tool that maps runways and helps pilots prepare for their flight in remote regions, because the data is not commercially available.

Until recently, a general lack of hard data made it difficult for mission groups to determine how effective an airplane would be in a particular region. Russell says that changed this year.

RUSSELL: Aviation effectiveness research. It's a set of data that was collected over seven countries over 324 interviews with users of mission aviation worldwide. Brazil, Peru, Niger, Cameroon, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea.

During this seven year project, mission organizations worked together on four years of field research. After three more years of compiling data, they unveiled the results at Oshkosh. And all that data is now available online. David Holsten, president of Missionary Aviation Fellowship, explains its significance.

HOLSTEN: I think that that tool will help to put some numbers and measurements on things that will make it a little bit more concrete for the rest of the world, they can understand, oh, this amount of isolation actually means, you know, this many hours in a car, this many days of not being able to do the ministry I really want to focus on...

These technological advances help mission organizations be good stewards of airplanes—some of the most expensive assets in ministry. Craig Russell says part of that stewardship involves cross-ministry collaboration.

RUSSELL: It's just sharing information and realizing we're all in this together. We're hands, feet, we're different parts of the body. And maximizing resources without duplicating service simply is passing that information on and helping each other.

Not only are mission aviators using new technology and data, they’re also benefiting from familiar technology. While before, in-person conferences were a go-to, now teams can connect virtually on a more regular basis. Here’s David Holsten again:

HOLSTEN: If somebody is willing to get up at an odd time of the day, you can have some some pretty good conversations. We just did that with our leadership team last week. So we had, you know, 60-70 people on this call that we arranged pretty quickly and, and we were just able to spend an hour with them praying, encouraging them from God's Word.

Zoom isn’t the only familiar technology making inroads in mission aviation.

HOLSTEN: I think a pretty impactful development in technology that will be a game changer for us, is probably going to be virtual reality. VR goggles where you can do training and send a video file to somebody who's on the other side of the world who has the goggles…

At the end of the day, it’s not really about technology. Instead, it is how technology is helping each organization further the gospel. As Jeff Werley says:

WERLEY: We want to be seen as the people that help and that red and white helicopter flying around helps us be those people. Church planting is the ultimate goal. But if it takes that little helicopter, let's do it.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Hayley Schoeppler in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

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