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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday May 21, 2001 Volume III Number 21 |
FOCUS - Flight Plans
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to fly. Fly an airplane. An ultra-light. A fighter jet. An airliner. A glider. Or fly like Superman, one of my favorite boyhood fantasies. Didn’t really matter as long as I was airborne.
I probably inherited this passion from my father, who served in the United States Navy during World War II. He was the younger of two boys, and was a top student in his Chicago high school. He scored at the head of his class in both mathematics and engineering (they looked for engineers in high school back then.) One of the first great disappointments in his life came when, as a Navy recruit, he applied for flight training. On the written exams, he finished in the highest percentile. But when they measured his height, then put him on the scale, the guy taking the measurements didn’t even make eye contact. “Nope. Too heavy. You’re out,” was all he said. Then he pointed to the Exit sign. And my dad’s dreams of naval aviator glory vanished like a puff of smoke.
But he never stopped thinking about it.
He transferred that fascination with life in the clouds right on to me, his first-born son. Every time an airplane passed overhead we’d look up and watch as it droned on by. We would identify it, guess at its altitude and cruising speed and payload, then check out its direction on the compass and speculate on its destination.
So no wonder that as a high school kid, I had plans to pick up where my dad left off back in the Navy. I’d fulfill his dream, and sit in that left seat, file my flight plan, and spend my working life in the cockpit with one hand on the throttle, the other on the stick and my feet monitoring the rudder pedals. I dreamed of the day my dad would sit next to me in the right seat, and I’d show him how it’s done. We’d buzz the house, and mom would be standin’ in the front yard wavin’ at us, and I’d tip my wings in salute to the old homestead. I could see my dad smile.
So I got a job at the local airport. They called me a “line-boy.” At age sixteen, with a valid driver’s license, I could drive the big red noisy tanker truck around the field and gas up the planes. I’d check the oil. Clean up the windshields. And every-time I moved that truck I radioed in to the tower and got permission from ground control to proceed. Heady stuff for a teenager. I’d a done it for free.
In the years I spent working the lines at the airport, I got to know pilots and mechanics and air traffic controllers and gum smackin’ waitresses slinging coffee mugs over at the diner. But the guys I liked the best came from a hangar at the end of the runway. They had a different attitude. They loved their work. They had a purpose. They trained to operate in remote parts of the world to serve the needs of people who lived way beyond the reach of civilization as I knew it then.
They called themselves missionary aviators.
They were a unique breed. I wanted to be one of them.
Like Kevin Donaldson.
* * * * * *
Kevin Donaldson never imagined he’d be front-page news all over the world. CNN. TIME. NEWSWEEK. NEW YORK TIMES. All of them.
He is one of hundreds of pilots who fly little single engine aircraft in and out of remote locations ferrying missionaries and supplies to forgotten people groups living quietly in some inhospitable corner of the planet. Oftentimes, his little airplane serves as a jungle ambulance. He’s a family man. A mechanic. He maintains every system on his little Cessna to insure safety and reliability. Most of his days are dull. Some of his days put him right on the ragged edge. He’s been out there for a long time.
Kevin has seen changes in the decade or so that he’s been in the jungle. He has a new navigational tool. His Global Positioning System works even out there in the Amazonas, making him less dependent on visual flight rules. He knows the terrain about as well as anyone. And generally, he likes to fly along the river to stay on course. But the jungle is immense, and when he looses sight of that meandering river, the flat jungle resembles a vast green body of water, as wide as an ocean. The thick foliage covers up just about anything that might serve as a landmark, a guidepost for a pilot. There are no water towers or skyscrapers or interstate highways or bridges or train tracks out there to keep him on course. Sometimes an unexpected storm puts him in a pelting rain or clouds can temporarily cut his visibility down to zero. His magnetic compass has its limitations, particularly as a steady wind can easily blow a small plane way off course. So GPS is a welcome addition to his instrument panel. It keeps him on target.
There are more airplanes now. Not many of them related to mission work. Most of the new air traffic is connected in some clandestine way to the burgeoning business of drug trafficking. Those green jungle rain forests have become fertile ground for the highly profitable coca plant.
So Kevin keeps in close touch with government officials. He always files a complete flight plan. The pontoons on his Cessna 185 allow him to use the Amazon River as a thousand mile long runway. And he’s careful with his cargo.
Kevin and his wife became good friends with another American family living on the river. Their jungle buddies ran their mission work from a two-bedroom houseboat that ran back and forth on two hundred miles of Amazon jungle riverfront, working in villages up and down the riverbanks of the swift current.
The Donaldsons and the Bowers liked to socialize. Sometimes from the air, Kevin would see his friends tied up somewhere along the river. He’d drop down to a hundred feet or so, and buzz the houseboat where his friends would run out on the deck and smile and wave. He’d fly by and tip his wings. They knew the risks. But tragedy wasn’t something they talked much about, or feared.
They were comrades in Kingdom service.
* * * * * * *
Veronica grew up in a military family. Her dad moved around a lot. Europe was as familiar as the States. She made friends easily and never really considered herself deprived. She felt privileged.
She was twelve when her dad settled into his first military job that approached something like permanent. Finally they would stay in the same town… Veronica hoped… through high school. A local pastor met her father in town and to everyone’s surprise, they hit it off. Soon the preacher was in their living room with an open Bible, and Veronica saw her dad’s tough exterior soften up. He seemed to open up to this minister. Veronica’s dad was a changed man. He switched from perpetual order barking. He became an approachable, caring father. Veronica knew the change was real. She wanted whatever it was that her dad had. She prayed with her daddy for the first time in her life. The whole family began to attend church together, and their home became a meeting place for folks coming through town. Missionaries. Evangelists. Pastors. Military personnel.
By the time Veronica, nicknamed Roni, completed high school, she determined that she wanted to be a missionary. She told her mother that she would not date or marry any man who did no share the same career goal. She went off to Bible College in North Carolina.
When she met Jim Bowers, she knew she’d found a life partner. He, too, wanted to serve God vocationally. He had dreams of service to God’s Kingdom, probably in Latin America just like his parents had.
Shortly after their wedding, Jim and Roni prepared for mission work. Their home church in Michigan encouraged them. They took language training. They decided on Peru.
When the doctors informed them that they would never have children of their own, they began the adoption process. A little boy, Cory, became part of their family in 1995. By then, they had developed a work on one of the many arteries of the headwaters of the great Amazon River. To assist them, their busy church in Michigan began building a houseboat, a two bedroom floating home. They shipped the craft to Peru in several large pieces, and a work crew traveled from Michigan to South America to assemble those parts. In a moving dedication ceremony at the water’s edge, the houseboat was launched. It was a new era of ministry for the Bowmans as they traveled two hundred miles of riverfront bringing food and medicine and education and Good News to villages up and down the river.
Roni surprised everyone when a do-it-yourself pregnancy test showed up positive. Everyone, including little Cory, celebrated the anticipated arrival of Jim and Roni’s child. But several months into the pregnancy, a cramped up Roni started premature labor. After a long and painful and untimely day in bed, Roni miscarried. She wrote that it was the most heartbreaking experience of her life of faith.
Seven months ago, Jim and Roni welcomed
their second adopted child. The
missionary couple named the little girl Charity.
“Faith, hope and charity,” Jim looked affectionately at his new baby
and quoted the King James Version of the Bible, “but ‘the greatest of these
is charity.’ It’s the right
name.” The young couple hugged
and nodded and smiled. Young Cory
would sit in the evening on the deck of the houseboat on the Amazon River, and
just stare and smile and coo at his new little sister.
Jim and Roni planned a trip home to visit family and supporters. They wanted to introduce everyone to Charity. They called Kevin Donaldson to schedule a flight to and from Iquitos upriver in Colombia to secure a visa for their new little girl.
The pilot radioed back affirmative, he would pick them up at the houseboat with this Cessna 185 floating airbus on April 20th.
It would be a routine flight along the Amazon River.
* * * * * * *
It was a clear, sunny day in Peru. No need for GPS. Visibility unlimited. Kevin filed his flight plan, and followed the line of the river as it wound its way through the thick jungle below. Next to Kevin who pilots the Cessna from the front left seat, was his colleague in ministry, Jim Bowers in the right hand seat. Jim’s wife Roni sat behind them with little Charity strapped in beside her. Cory, age seven, occupied the seats behind Roni. He looked every bit the young man behind his mother and his little sister. They droned along at altitude, straight and level, heading home.
Tipped off by a surveillance plane operated by the Central Intelligence Agency that the Cessna was traveling through suspect territory, a Peruvian A-37b jet pulled up next to Kevin’s Cessna and slowed into formation. The Peruvians believed the Cessna to be breaking the law. Drug running. Carrying a cargo hold filled with the makings of illicit drugs. It was for them a hostile encounter.
The area was a known center for the shipment of coca paste in and out of clandestine landing strips all over this jungle region. The Peruvians later claimed that they attempted several times to establish communication.
But they failed even to attempt to identify the airplane’s registration. They never checked to see if a flight plan had been filed. A wide door opened on the side of the military jet (whose mission was a no-nonsense attack on drug runners) and a gunner took aim. The pilot and the gunner shouted into their radio microphones above the whine of the jet engines and the howling wind outside.
None
of the passengers in the Cessna would ever hear a gunshot.
But the gunner in the jet with the automatic weapon pulled the trigger
and opened fire sending a fusillade of high caliber bullets directly at the
defenseless missionary airplane, a feeder belt mechanically delivering
countless shells into the chamber of the high tech weapon and the firing pin
pounding away and exploding a seemingly endless supply of new shells into the
chamber at high speed, sounding like an urban air-hammer, RAT-A-TAT-TAT,
sending a stream of deadly steel missiles in the direction of an innocent
family heading home.
The first the bullets ripped though the high wing of the Cessna and the fuel tanks and then tore in a straight line into the fuselage leaving a series of ragged holes in the metal. From inside, only the sound was of steel tearing through the thin skin and the frame of the aircraft. One bullet, just one of those many bullets, tore through the Plexiglas window and then through Roni’s chest and then little Charity’s delicate skull, instantly killing them both.
One more bullet from the automatic weapon caught both of the pilot Kevin’s legs just as he pulled hard left in an attempt to avoid the unprovoked attack by the Peruvian military aircraft.
Jim turned around as Kevin maneuvered his small plane into an evasive dive. He saw the smatterings of blood, and the lifeless bodies of the two women he loved the most. A fire broke out, and he felt the plane shuttering, and sputtering. They were dropping fast. They were about to crash. Little Cory sat in the back stunned, bewildered. Silent. The young father reached back from the front seat, but felt helpless as a man can be. Despair like he had never known struck him mute.
Somehow, Kevin, both legs hit, fought the controls. He was a veteran bush pilot, but this crisis, this terrible moment, his body crying out it pain, was an unimaginable predicament. He brought the burning plane to level flight, though he was quickly loosing altitude. There was no power. The fire got worse. When the pontoons hit the water, the two tips submerged and flipped the plane forward. Strapped securely in their seats, the pilot, the missionary and the little boy survived the crash. The muddy Amazon water quenched the flames. Now inverted, high wing flat on the surface of the water, the airplane stayed afloat. Jim managed to pull his little boy Cory, and then the bodies of his wife and his daughter, from the wreckage. Kevin, legs bleeding badly, managed to climb out of the cockpit and on to a pontoon.
For thirty agonizing minutes, the occupants of the downed missionary airplane sat drifting in the current of the brown and muddy Amazon on the charred wreckage. The aircraft sunk to the level of the upside down pontoons and caught the bottom of the river in shallower waters, leaving the bullet riddled floats exposed above the surface, along with three dazed survivors and two lifeless bodies.
Finally a boat from a nearby village came to rescue them.
* * * * * *
Just last month, the whole world mourned the senseless loss of Roni and Charity Bowers.
In
one of several memorial services, just behind Jim and Kevin, sat another
missionary pilot. Steve was called
in for a purpose: to get some time with young Cory age seven, who sat next to
his dad, bewildered, too young to process the terrible reason for this
gathering. It would soon become
all too real that this little boy would grow up without the loving embrace of
his mother or the adoring giggles of his little sister.
Steve, pleased to be asked to play this meaningful role, knew that Cory wouldn’t say much. He would nod, even smile, in appreciation of the kind words and the hugs and the tearful expressions of sympathy. But he’s too young yet to really understand.
Steve, a dad himself, could only tell Cory his own story. And establish a friendship that will last a lifetime. That’s what it will take. A lifetime.
Steve’s last name is Saint. It was more than forty years ago. Steve was himself just five years old. It was 1958 when little Steve Saint sat in a small Ecuadorian church and listened to adults speak from open Bibles about tragedy and hope and courage and love and forgiveness. Mainly they were talking about five missionaries, all murdered in a savage primitive attack of arrows and blowguns and spears and axes in a thick jungle on a riverbank next to a small airplane on a sand bar deep in the heart of darkness.
That was the day little Steven said a reluctant good-bye to his father, his hero, a missionary pilot named Nate Saint.
At the Bower Memorial Service, Steve found Cory afterwards standing in an isolated corner. Steve, heart and head filled with painful memories, took Cory in his arms and quietly wept.
* * * * * *
It’s been more than thirty years since I left my job at the airport and went off to school with aspirations of becoming a missionary pilot. Sometimes I wonder why I never did earn that coveted place in the left seat. And now that my dad’s gone, the opportunity to take him for a ride and buzz the house with mom down there smilin’ and wavin’, well it’s too late for that.
But now that I think of it, I’m thankful for those dreams. They were a gift from my dad. They don’t haunt me anymore as some kind of failure. Those dreams have taken me all over the world. I’ve met heroes of every kind. Those dreams gave me a good wife and family. They taught me that life is best when you think of it as soaring. As though you had wings like eagles.
Kevin Donaldson is one of those heroes. So are Jim and Roni Bowers. And Nate Saint. I never met them personally.
But their life story enriches mine.
* * * * * *
On this Monday morning, you are a leader.
Your days may sometimes seem as dull as a the flight of a single engine light plane droning up and down the same old predictable riverbank you’ve seen a thousand times before. You may be living with some “what ifs;” what if you had completed that program you started way back when? What if you took that job you were offered, instead of this one?
You filed your flight plan – but things haven’t turned out the way you anticipated they would.
Consider this – If you had warned Roni Bowers of the dangers of her life choices, would she have changed her mind? If you had told Kevin Donaldson that Peru was too risky, would he have packed it in? If you had the chance, and you told Nate Saint he might be ambushed in the jungle by a murderous tribe, would he have turned in his wings? No way.
There is purpose in your calling. In your work. Your flight plan is on file, but be ready for surprises.
And if your kids dare entertain wild and crazy dreams of what they may someday become, share the excitement of those dreams with them. It’s a fragile flower aching to bloom. Don’t quench those eager hopes with the icy cold water of reality therapy. Let them imagine great things. Wonderfully outrageous things.
You’ve got what it takes. Stay tuned in to the God who listens and knows your name. Just like Jim and Roni and Steve. They set the pace.
Today. Just for today. Take up wings like an eagle.
Think of it as soaring.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2001
Want to know more about the BOWERS? Click here.
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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