The Right Stuff and the Future Mission Aviator

by Jon Lewis

When I was a boy, my dream was to one day become an astronaut. I lived and breathed everything NASA—from monitoring the orbit patterns of the first satellites to actually building a full-scale mockup of the Gemini spacecraft and flying multi-day simulated ‘missions’ in my basement.

Photos courtesy Jon Lewis

When I was a boy, my dream was to one day become an astronaut. I lived and breathed everything NASA—from monitoring the orbit patterns of the first satellites to actually building a full-scale mockup of the Gemini spacecraft and flying multi-day simulated ‘missions’ in my basement. 

All that it meant to be an astronaut in those days is what I aspired to be, especially having that bold ‘can do’ attitude mixed with intelligence and common sense. Later, author Tom Wolfe coined an iconic term that was the perfect description of those first astronauts: they were men who had the right stuff. 

Having the right stuff meant everything from knowing how to handle complex technologies to being cool, calm, and collected in the face of unexpected crisis. It was the ultimate description of macho capability—someone who could figure out how to bring a successful conclusion to just about any dilemma or challenge. The first seven Mercury astronauts where models of all that. Is it any wonder that I can still rattle off their names today? They were my heroes!

I never became an astronaut. But I also never lost my admiration for someone who had the right stuff. That was the reason that, despite never becoming a part of NASA, I was attracted to Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF). I joined MAF in 1977 with the desire to serve as a mission pilot on a challenging mission field somewhere in a remote corner of the world.

I quickly discovered that being an MAF pilot was a great way for someone who wanted to demonstrate and utilize the right stuff. Flying behind the yoke of a Cessna 185 tail-dragger over the pygmy-inhabited jungles of northern Congo with HF radio static crackling through the headphones of my helmet and nothing more than a compass, map, and watch for navigation, I couldn’t help but feel I had arrived at being a real man. 

Along with my fellow MAF-pilot colleagues, we had plenty of pride in being able to use our technical skills and gifting in the service of God’s kingdom in that way. Patterning ourselves after Nate Saint, the ultimate jungle pilot (as memorialized in the book by that same name, Jungle Pilot), we emulated his heart for ministry with an unparalleled ability to create, improvise, and most of all, single-handedly succeed.

Exactly twenty years and sixteen days after the first American was launched into space, NASA successfully conducted the first flight of the space shuttle. It was the beginning of a new era of space travel. More importantly, it was the beginning of a new era of what it meant to be an astronaut. 

From that moment on, astronauts have been known not nearly as much for having the right stuff as they are for being men and women who know how to do stuff right. The International Space Station is a beautiful example of this today; its crew is a multicultural, multi-national team of highly-trained specialists working together in successful collaboration to achieve a common mission. No less brave or passionate than their predecessors, contemporary astronauts no longer depend on their macho individualism to accomplish tasks; instead, they focus on being team players who can contribute specific abilities for the good of the whole.

I believe the current era of mission aviation also calls for a similar type of new mission aviator who has less right stuff attitude and more competency in doing stuff right. Why do we need this new type of mission pilot, and in what ways does he or she need to be competent? Let me explain.

Game Changers in the Mission Aviation World

I believe the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were well served with the right-stuff pilots of that day—myself included. Mission flight programs were, for the most part, remote, single-family bases that needed strong, creative, independent managers. 

Mission strategy was mostly determined by well-trained and well-funded Western missionaries who had a clear sense of how the airplane could enhance and accelerate the cause of Christ. As pilots, we didn’t need to worry much about the strategic use of the airplane. All we had to do was assure that we could get missionaries safely from A to B. 

It was natural to leave it up to them to figure out the mission strategy needed to grow God’s kingdom or plant his Church. Our job was to be competent pilot-mechanics, and that is exactly what we were.

But the decade of the 1990s brought with it three important game changers:

1. The rise of the Global South. It was during the 1990s that many Western missionaries left mission fields they had dominated for the previous 150 years. They left either because their jobs were finished and an indigenous church was taking over, or because they were forced to leave due to political unrest. In either case, this gave rise to the Global South as a new major player on the world missions scene. 

Whether we call it the Global South, the Majority World, or the Two-Thirds World, the simple fact remains that this part of the world has emerged as the center of Evangelical Christianity. 

For every one Evangelical Christian in North America, Europe, and Australia, there are four in Latin America, Africa, and Asia today. And, more cross-cultural missionaries are being sent by the Global South than the Global North. Although light, charter-type aviation is still in demand today in developing countries, it is no longer being requested primarily by Western missionaries; instead, it is needed by national church leaders as well as a long list of commercial clients, NGOs, and government agencies. 

However, these new clients do not necessarily practice the same strategic thinking about how the airplane should be used, nor do they always have a bottomless pocket of financial resources to pay the subsidized rates on which the service depends. 

2. Increased technology complexity. A second dynamic that changed things was caused by the decreasing use, and therefore increased cost, of avgas needed by small, piston-powered aircraft. As the world responded to the incredible boom in global airline service, oil refineries began pumping out the cheaper, less refined Jet A fuel to meet that demand at the expense of continuing to supply avgas needed for the shrinking general aviation sector. Prices of avgas quadrupled in places like Indonesia and Angola from $4 to $15 and $20 a gallon, quickly putting the cost of a charter flight in a small Cessna out of sight for most people. 

Responding to this economic reality, mission aviation operators began replacing their workhorse Cessna 185s and 206s with turbine-powered planes that burned the cheaper Jet A fuel, such as the Cessna Caravan, Pilatus Porter, and the Quest Kodiak. 

But not only did these planes come with a price tag triple that of their piston predecessors, they also demanded a great deal more technical training, understanding, and upkeep to be operated economically and maintained safely. With a replacement turbine engine costing upwards of $350,000, the shade-tree, fishing-tackle toolbox approach to aircraft maintenance that might have been perfectly adequate before simply did not cut it now.

3. Greater aviation regulation. For many decades, mission aviation operators were able to function in developing countries that had little to no experience in regulating air transport. In some cases, civil aviation departments took their cues from the local MAF operations as models of standards and safety. 

But with a growing aviation industry impacting the entire globe, even the least developed countries began upgrading their civil aviation authorities to follow suit. Today, the relatively loose operating permits for mission aviation programs that allowed for independent, jungle-style operations are a thing of the past. Pilots are now expected to meet international standards in all aspects of their flight operations, often forcing mission programs to acquire commercial Air Operators Certificates (AOC) required by all airlines. 

These are just some of the changing dynamics that began signaling the need for a mission aviator with a different mind-set, experience, and set of expectations than in the past. 

Yesterday and Today

So what do these new dynamics demand of the mission aviator today compared to those of us who flew several decades ago? Here are some of the contrasts I see that are critical in order for modern mission pilots to do stuff right.

	1950–2000 Right Stuff Pilots	2000–2020 Doing Stuff Right Pilots
Mindset	Jungle pilot spirit—using airplanes to speed the gospel to the ends of the earth	Missional spirit—offering technology to help enhance cross-cultural ministry
Training	Highly trained for unusual, abnormal operations	Highly trained primarily for standard, normal operations
Strength	Working solo or independently	Working as an outstanding team player
Focus	How to respond to requests from Western missionaries with effective aviation service	How to proactively position flight service in order to advance ministry of the local church
Emphasis	Priority of technical expertise; ability to adapt culturally not as critical	Priority of cross-cultural intelligence leading to adapting and communicating effectively; without it, technical ability is of little value
Calling	To be a competent, safe pilot—other ministry is left to those carried in the plane	To be a competent, safe pilot who is personally engaged in the Missio Dei and helping others become disciples of Christ

 

New Demands for a New Day

There are other characteristics needed by tomorrow’s mission pilots that have no equivalence in mission aviation of the past.

1. Handling new technology. Mission aviation is benefiting from the amazing revolution in technology that has resulted in doing things faster, better, and cheaper. But this comes at the price of needing to master technology well enough to achieve competency. 

Already, such items as diesel aircraft engines, satellite aircraft-tracking systems, and GPS flight directors with artificial imaging are making their way into the cockpit of mission aircraft. But just around the corner, the future could easily bring other innovations to mission pilots such as auto-landing capability, electric engines that allow for vertical takeoffs, and even the use of unmanned drones. All of these will require greater expertise of future mission aviators to not only make the technology function properly, but also to apply it in ways that are in keeping with effective cross-cultural ministry. 

2. Business as mission. Without question, much of the future of mission aviation will shift from the private charter-flight ministry it has been to that of a community commercial air service. Although the primary motivation for this change will be economic, demanding a mindset that can maximize profits in challenging developing-market settings, it also opens opportunities for the mission aviator to fully explore the ministry possibilities of BAM—Business As Mission. 

In this context, the operation will need to be positioned as a platform for witness both in the way its staff interacts with other people and in the model of business integrity it provides to the surrounding community. 

3. Competitive local aviation. Most settings where mission aviation has flourished during the past seventy years have been ones in which mission aviation was pretty much the only game in town. But this is no longer the case. The rise of new aviation business ventures fueled by wealthy entrepreneurs can now be found in virtually all areas categorized as mission frontiers. 

The competitive challenge they bring to mission aviation is not just in less expensive operational costs by employing local staff, but in utilizing questionable standards of safety or succumbing to payoffs to corrupt government officials in order to maintain flight approvals. The future mission aviator will be grappling with all this as a matter of course while trying to craft a successful flight service of his or her own.

4. Hostility toward westerners. Although many former missionary airmen faced significant hostility to their ministry, nothing parallels the increasing anti-American or anti-Western spirit that is on the rise in many places around the globe today. Even more difficult is that those places of greatest hostility toward westerners are precisely the places that are most unreached with the gospel. Choosing to serve in such environments will continue to stretch the capacity of the pilot’s family survival as it already has in such places as the Middle East or Central Africa.

Celebrating Consistency

Despite all that is required today of the modern mission pilot, there are some things that simply must not change. Just like today’s astronauts must continue to embody many of the same kinds of passion, endurance, and commitment to excellence that marked the original Mercury astronauts, so too must mission pilots today model qualities for which their predecessors were known. These include:

1. High commitment to Christ. This is what drove the pioneers of mission aviation since the 1950s and must still be the fundamental baseline for all mission service today

2. Readiness for self-sacrifice. No matter how many ATM machines or supermarkets might be found in a mission-field setting, without a readiness to sacrifice a certain measure of comfort and safety, mission aviation in the developing world will never succeed.

3. Love for merging technology and ministry into creative service. The cutting edge of technology will never again be HF radios, telex machines, or PACTOR communications; instead, future mission pilots will need to maintain an ability to find appropriate applications for new technology to ministry outreach in both the aviation field, as well as in related fields of communications and data processing.

4. Ability to manage a family that can thrive in cross-cultural settings. In my day, most mission pilots left the field primarily because of family issues that prevented them from adapting long term to the new culture they were in. Likely, the same challenges of cross-cultural adaptation will exist in the future, demanding a high priority be put on cultural preparation for field operations.

5. Responsibility for spiritual growth. Although a pilot and his or her family are totally surrounded by the ministry endeavor, keeping from becoming spiritually dry is a constant challenge, especially without a local church that is attuned to offer help or counseling for the expat family. Maintaining a vibrant relationship with Christ will always demand a greater degree of personal discipline.

6. Passion for the Great Commission. Nothing should fuel more ardently the reason for a mission pilot to be engaged in his or her line of ministry than Jesus’ command to Go, and make disciples of all nations. Pushing well beyond the task of claiming souls for heaven, the Great Commission should be the motivation for readiness to make every relationship on the mission field an opportunity for Christian mentoring and disciple-making.

7. Modeling the Great Commandment. The most well-remembered mission pilots of past years were without question those who exemplified the life of Christ in daily, loving actions while loading and flying their planes. No changes in technology or culture will ever make this quality of loving our neighbor as ourselves obsolete.

The Bottom Line

The successful mission aviator of tomorrow must be equipped in ways that are different than his or her predecessors of my generation. But that difference is not simply having more of the right stuff than we did. It will mean an intentional, committed effort to:

• Doing preparation right—not compromising on the time, energy, and outcome of cross-cultural orientation, language training, and spiritual/missional formation needed to thrive on the mission field of tomorrow

•  Doing technology right—not being as enamored with the technology itself as being dedicated to finding the best ways possible for it to become a platform that will advance the cause of Christ in the local context

•  Doing missions right—demonstrating a missiologist’s mindset in how to be a servant partner and steward leader of valuable aviation resources that ultimately fit into the big picture of what God is doing through his Church

•  Doing relationships right—being a positive contributor to the ministry team, a disciple-making encourager for national and expat friends, and salt and light in the model of Jesus for all those who have yet to claim him
as Lord

I am confident that the men and women who embody these sorts of priorities will not only be successful as future mission aviators, but will significantly help in the next era of advancing God’s kingdom on the mission frontiers of the world.

. . . .

Jon Lewis has served for twenty-six years as pilot and manager with Mission Aviation Fellowship and for eight years as CEO of Partners International. He is senior associate for Partnership Advancement at One Challenge International. Jon and his wife reside today in Spokane, Washington.

EMQ, Vol. 53, No. 2. Copyright  © 2017 Billy Graham Center for Evangelism.  All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMQ editors.

 

Questions for Reflection 1. How might the right stuff pilot attitude described in the article still be reflected in a rugged, independent individualism of other Western mission workers serving around the world? How could this be both a positive and a negative to ministry success? 2. How do you think the changing global dynamics are also going to change the way church and missions organizations need or use the services of mission aviation? (e.g., UAV’s drones, community charter services, etc.) 3. How can church communities today help young future mission pilots adopt a more realistic do stuff right approach to missions work than to still be attracted to the romanticized ‘jungle pilot’ attitude of the past?