As Mission Aviation Fellowship prepares to celebrate International Civil Aviation Day on December 7, the organization says more pilots are needed to fly its life-saving and economy-building routes.
“Civil Aviation Day was created by the UN to draw attention to the incredibly important contribution of aviation to the social and economic development of countries all over the world,” says Brad Bell, CEO of MAF. “Our part of Civil Aviation Day is not flying between major city centres, but to some of the most remote places on the planet to deliver medical aid or food aid, or to respond to a natural disaster.”
It’s vital work that requires the commitment of skilled pilots, imaginative engineers, capable managers and proficient IT personnel, and MAF would like to add people in each of these fields. Its flight school in Alberta, for example, is set to double in size as it targets a much-expanded squad of pilots.
“We have a 10-year goal: to have 100 missionaries in 10 years,” Bell explains. “We have 43 right now. But when I say ‘100,’ I mean 100 net of attrition. So we probably need to find 140 pilots in order to make that number.”
Bell also emphasizes a need for logistics-minded managers to run air bases and oversee scheduling.
“We need managers to handle all that,” he says. “And IT people are also important, as one of the first questions a young family will ask when considering missions is the quality of the internet for Facetiming Grandma.”
MAF’s mission field is broad, and its work is ever-changing. But serving communities through aviation is also rewarding and invigorating. Using Papua, Indonesia as an example, Bell says a pilot’s typical day can involve flying into remote mountain villages, perhaps to deliver medicine or school supplies. They may also do a medivac, where they fly a critically ill person to a larger centre.
“We might also be doing disaster relief or flying a missionary for an organization like Wycliffe into a remote location,” he says. “We make it possible for many mission organizations to have missionaries living remotely. We’re their lifeline.”
There’s a component of economic development, too.
A number of years ago, Bell’s MAF plane landed in a village in Papua New Guinea, where it loaded 50 kg bags of coffee beans. The pilot then flew the cargo into a larger centre to sell at a market, after which the revenue was brought back to the village.
“We’re actually part of that economy,” he says. “We’re part of that country’s economy, and we’re a mainstay for the economy of the village.”
One of the most impactful, and emotional, flights that Bell accompanied was with a Canadian pilot in South Sudan. They’d already made seven or eight stops, and at one of them, they picked up a group of volunteers from the United States that had been installing solar panels at a remote field hospital.
“It really hit me when the hospital’s head nurse came out carrying a little baby,” he recalls. “She said, ‘I’m not going to have to hold babies that are dying in my arms anymore!’ I asked her what she meant by that, and she said the NICU required oxygen generators that needed electricity, and the electricity in the village was terrible. But the solar panels would now be able to provide the power.”
There are countless such stories of MAF’s impact in the dozens of countries it serves in Africa, Asia/Pacific and the Americas – stories its pilots, engineers, managers, IT personnel and support staff have helped to write.
“We are using aircraft to deliver help, hope and healing,” says Bell. “If you have an interest in our organization and want to explore it, just visit our website and start up a conversation with us.”