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Dennis Fulton's closest call as a missionary pilot wasn't amid a hail of bullets during a flight but with armed, drunken soldiers on an airfield in the central African country of Zaire. They threatened to shoot.

"We have had hijacking; we have had hostages in the history of our organization," says Fulton, now chief operating officer of Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF). The Redlands, California-based ministry support organization operates more than 70 aircraft in remote regions of 24 countries. Last year it logged 41,000 flights.

But generally, he says, "Getting shot out of the sky is not a big concern." Only six MAF planes have ever been hit by gunfire, and none of those crashed. "Being shot on the ground is another story. I'm much more concerned about driving from the house to the airport on the roads in a lot of these countries."

On April 20, a Peruvian Air Force plane downed a Cessna belonging to the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based Association of Baptists for World Evangelism (ABWE), mistaking it for a drug-running craft. While the tragic deaths of ABWE missionary Veronica Bowers, 35, and her

7-month-old adopted daughter Charity may prompt agencies to rethink safety and security issues, representatives agree that doing everything by the book, as the ABWE Cessna's pilot Kevin Donaldson apparently did, does not guarantee safety.

"We feel that this is an isolated incident," says Arthur Lightbody, vice president of communications for JAARS (formerly the Jungle Aviation and Research Service), the Waxhaw, North Carolina-based aviation arm of Wycliffe Bible Translators. JAARS-trained pilots in 10 countries average 15,000 flights a year.

"Missions are used to chaos," Fulton says, citing corruption and crumbling infrastructure in many countries. "What we haven't realized is that we've gone from living in a crazy world to a dangerous world. That's what we're seeing now: the upswing in hostage-taking [and] hijackings. Those are more threats than actually being shot out of the sky."

"There are a lot of bullet holes in missionary aircraft, especially in Africa," says Edward H. Robinson, director of missionary aviation technology for Moody Aviation, a pilot training program in Elizabethton, Tennessee.

Those bullet holes came from ground-to-air fire, according to Chris Donesa, staff director and chief counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources.

Peru and Colombia are the primary problem countries in South America. The United States helps other governments identify drug-carrying planes. Donesa says the ABWE incident in Peru is extremely unusual.

That cooperative program has been suspended in Peru and Colombia pending the results of a U.S. government investigation. Jim Bowers, husband of Veronica, and their 6-year-old son Cory, were not hurt. Pilot Donaldson was seriously injured with multiple wounds to his legs.

Both JAARS and MAF sometimes fly in volatile areas. MAF has pulled its workers out of Congo and Haiti several times but left its ministry infrastructure in place and later returned. But both JAARS and MAF have pulled out of Colombia, where internal warfare has raged for years. Lightbody believes that flying small aircraft to support missionaries generally is a safe activity.

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June 11 2001, Vol. 45, No. 8