We have been working at full throttle the last few months in the flight program on Mindanao. We have been really excited to see first hand the work the Lord is doing among tribal people here in all our locations and how their love for the Lord compels them to reach out to neighboring tribes. It is an exciting time and we were just ramping up into a fully functioning program when things came to a screeching hault.
Brian is checked out on all but one of our airstrips and has been waiting to get checked out in the final location until the missionaries who live there returned from furlough. A few weeks ago, they returned so Brian and Garry, our chief pilot, set out to finish that checkout. Garry flew the airplane to the airstrip and we carefully evaluated it from the air by making a couple of low passes. No missionaries had been there for months so we gave it a really good look before we committed to land.
This airstrip is pretty simple compared to our others, but it is short (930′) and in a box canyon so there is a “point-of-no-return” where we are committed to land no matter what happens. Garry was flying the approach and I was looking carefully for anything amiss before we got to the committal point on the approach. After passing the committal point, we were finally close enough to see that someone had planted a corn field right on the end of the runway and we would be forced to land longer than planned. Normally we would have gone around and tried again, but we were already committed to land. Garry flew an approach to a point just beyond the normal touchdown zone.
When we crossed the corn field we got a slight updraft that pushed us a little further and caused us to touch down about 150′ from the end of the runway (110′ longer than normal). A combination of soft mud from a downpour the night before and a thick layer of grass clippings on top of the mud caused us to have abnormally strong braking performance. This caused the tail of the plane to come up rapidly and the propeller cut into the mud. Garry was able to get the tail back down under control and we rolled to a stop with the engine still at idle. We were praising God that the airplane didn’t flip over!
We knew that what took only a split second to occur would take several weeks to fix. We secured the airplane and took some pictures on our cell phones and hiked out of the tribe to where we could catch a bus. It was a long day and really discouraging to see things stalled out for a couple of months but we thank God that is wasn’t worse. Please pray for us as we work through the logistics of replacing the engine and propeller in the jungle location. Also pray for us as we try to service missionaries overland with our Landcruiser. Brian will spend many, many hours on less than ideal roads trying to keep everyone supplied.
[…] God would have it, we had damaged our airplane the day Tukid went to the hospital and were now resorting to driving via 4×4 into the tribe. […]