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On the edge of the Amazon jungle in Peru, at a mission station called Yarinacocha, I waited with a few others to board a six-seater Helio Courier for a two-hour trip into the jungle. Rain and other complications had slowed us down. So we sat with the pilots in their "office," a grimy little room that smelled like fuel oil, the walls plastered with maps, the workspace cluttered with radios, oil cans, dirty coffee mugs, and dog-eared log books. One of the pilots asked me, "If a plane is flying and there is a bird flying inside the plane, does it add weight?" Pilots love putting these kinds of questions to innocents like me who are unschooled in aerodynamics. I was saved when someone announced that we had been cleared for departure, and I never let on that I didn't have a clue.

We boarded the Helio Courier floatplane and buckled in. I watched in awe as our pilot turned cranks and flipped switches to pull us onto the water and position us for takeoff. The engines roared and the pontoons glided across the surface of the lake, then lifted and carried us into a faraway world hidden in a carpet of solid green jungle.

Jesus tells us to make disciples of all nations even to the uttermost parts of the earth, and surely that is where our pilot took us that day. Heroic people have consistently answered that call. It's easy to forget, however, that to do so in today's mission era often requires a brave pilot going there first, checking the lay of the land, calculating landing possibilities, then fighting with machetes for every inch of an airstrip and hoping not to hit a rock or a cow on the first landing.

The "bush pilot" has long defined the essence of mission aviation. In today's world, however, the mission aviator's role is changing as new challenges arise. Once immune to assaults spawned by intertribal and political conflicts, missionaries are now considered targets, and missionary pilots are a special prize: they come with planes. Terrorism, tribalism, religious persecution, and drug trafficking have complicated and compromised mission aviation's blue skies—the shooting down of a missionary plane in Peru a year ago (see "Flying Unfriendly Skies," CT, June 11, 2001, p. 22) is but one example.

What does this mean for the role and future of mission aviation? What does it take for a pilot to get into the cockpit to help missionaries answer the Great Commission?

The uttermost parts of the world have largely been penetrated. There are still a few frontier pockets where airstrips have to be hacked out of the jungle and where tribes swarm around the plane because of its novelty. Thirty years ago, missions experts thought the Third World's economic growth would make mission aviation obsolete by the end of the 20th century.

"We expected to be spooling down and getting out of the business because of development," says Ed Robinson, director of Moody Aviation, a premier flight-training school run by Moody Bible Institute and located in the mountains of eastern Tennessee.

Some locations, in fact, have "spooled down" and "gotten out." Andy Halbert, former program manager for Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) in Honduras and pastor of administration and missions at Christ Covenant Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, oversaw the closing of MAF in Honduras. "Technology, the building of roads, and the advancement of the gospel have caused this era of mission aviation to end there," he says.

Yet in other parts of the world, contrary to predictions, it is a different story. "When you look at certain places in Africa, the needs are greater now than they were 40 years ago," says Robinson. "Today, in some locations there are only about 10 percent of the usable roads that were there in 1960."

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February 4 2002, Vol. 46, No. 2