Serving in the skies

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, August 21st. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Teenagers taking to the sky!

Becoming a missionary pilot is a big commitment. The training process can take 7 to 10 years and cost thousands of dollars.

As baby boomers continue to retire, the need for new missionary pilots is becoming critical. What can ministries do now to inspire the next generation of pilots?

World Journalism Institute mid-career graduate Theresa Haynes paid a visit to a mission aviation summer camp in Washington state. And she brings us the story.

THERESA HAYNES: It is lunchtime in the hangar at the Mission Aviation Training Academy or MATA. A group of teen girls have more on their minds than pulled pork, beans, and rice. Half of them have just finished a flying lesson, and the other half are getting ready to take off.

STUDENTS: I got super lightheaded. You should have learned it in aerodynamics. It’s because the blood rushed to your feet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eighteen students are spending the week learning how to fly a plane. Each day, they spend three hours in ground school, learning the basics of controlling an aircraft. Then they spend another three hours in a Cessna 172. Taking turns, each student sits in the pilot’s seat with an FAA-certified instructor and flies the plane.

JEREMY CROWELL: All we got to do is relax that back pressure, and then we'll give it full power to recover from that, and then hold the climb pitch attitude, and then we'll bring the flaps off 10 degrees at a time …

Flight instructor Jeremy Crowell prepares students to practice recovering from engine stalls.

CROWELL: Why do we want to know how to do a stall? Well, number one, to avoid it, because at low altitudes, stalls can be deadly…

SOUND: [Engine starts up and begins to taxi away]

For 17-year-old Naomi Thomas, flying an aircraft is very different from driving a car. For one thing, it is three-dimensional. And while some of the instruments look similar, they have different functions. In a car the pedals control the gas and brakes. In an airplane they control the rudder.

NAOMI THOMAS: It's more complicated, but not as hard as I thought it would be.

Hannah Perszyk, who is also 17, grew up near an airport. Before camp, she had never been in an airplane, but always dreamed of being a pilot. When she became a Christian three years ago, she started thinking about missions. When she heard about the aviation camp she realized it was something she could do.

HANNAH PERSZYK: Oh, wait, I could actually do this. And it sounds fun. And it's something I would enjoy doing. Because I have a passion for reaching the lost. And I like flying.

Connecting aviation with missions is an important aspect of the summer camp. MATA director Dary Fink says every evening, they focus on God’s heart for the lost.

DARY FINK: We talk about the billions of people that are in poverty, are hurting, in conflict and war and famine.

He tells students that missionary pilots serve a vital role in reaching the world’s most remote people.

FINK: Can the airplane be used to bring medicine and food and Bibles and teachers and doctors and hope…

Five years ago, Abigail McMillan attended aviation camp and began asking God if she should be a missionary pilot.

ABIGAIL MCMILLAN: When I committed my life to Christ, I remember thinking very clearly, well, I'm not living my life for myself anymore.

After graduating high school, McMillan served as a nanny for a missionary family in Brazil. After that, she attended Bible college at Ethnos 360 Bible Institute.

MCMILLAN: And I actually had a friend at Bible College who sort of begged me to, you know, come. We have a plane and a helicopter, but we don't have a pilot. Come fly for us when you finish your training.

When she returned home to Washington, McMillan began training as an airplane mechanic. Now, at 21, she is working on her private pilot’s license.

Gary Elliott is the curriculum director at MATA, and he helped start the camp in 2007. He says many ministries are desperate for pilots.

GARY ELLIOTT: We had a case, some years back, where there's a hospital in Africa and they had a Cessna 206 there at the hospital, for medical evacuation purposes, to fly patients from these remote locations into the hospital. And the plane was just sitting there with no pilot.

AUDIO: [Students planning cross country flight]

The aviation campers are gathered around a conference table. They each have a planning chart and a map of the Puget Sound. They are calculating distance, weight and fuel consumption for their cross-country flight. Tomorrow each of them will fly about 50 nautical miles.

FINK: We pray before every flight. It's in the checklist. We've done everything we know how to do and now we give it to the Lord and ask him to help it be a learning session and edifying to each other. And to thank you Lord, that we get to see the Earth. Only a few humans in history have ever been able to see from God's perspective.

McMillan also continues to pray as she looks forward to serving on the mission field.

MCMILLAN: So there's that excitement paired with the realization of, my life is in God's hands. And it really could be taken at any point, especially with the work that I'm going into. If I'm facing those kinds of airstrips, that's something that you got to keep before the Lord. Today could be my day, tomorrow could be my day, doing dangerous work. But it's so worth it to provide a means of spreading the Gospel.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Theresa Haynes in Arlington, Washington.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.