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Ground School:
Impacting Teenagers for Mission Aviation
by Eric Engen
On the first Monday evening of second semester, in a cozy classroom on the Blue Mountain Academy campus, three students met for the first formal ground school session since Adventist World Aviation took over the flight training program in 2007. Rudolph (Mo) Pelley, who recently retired from the Pennsylvania Conference as treasurer, is the ground school teacher.
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| Mo Pelley with a map of the routes he often flew in Africa. He holds in his hands his pilot licenses from Malawi, Rhodesia, Congo, Canada, and the United States. | |
Mo is quite a story teller. Rather than jump into a discussion of the four forces of flight, he brought slides (you know, those things kind of like a mechanical Power Point!) of the trans-Atlantic flight that he and Bob Seamont flew in the 1970’s to deliver a Cessna 206 to the Congo Union. Dale Tillay accompanied them in a Cessna 182 that was also being delivered to Africa. Mo told how they left Boston’s Logan International Airport as a formation flight of two, flew to Saint Johns, Newfoundland, then across the Atlantic to the Azores. Midway to the Azores, they encountered engine trouble. Unable to maintain altitude, the airplane began descending at 500 fpm from 9,000 feet MSL. They radioed New York Center of their position, readied the life raft, cracked open the door, and prepared to ditch in the Atlantic Ocean. When the engine began responding again at 3,000 feet MSL, they rejoiced that God had heard and answered their prayers. They continued to the Canary Islands, where they thoroughly inspected the engine and could find nothing wrong. So they pressed on across continental African rain forests and finally to their mission destination in the Congo. All this without a GPS!
Mo worked in Africa for nine years, serving as a mission pilot for the Congo Union Conference, the Malamulo Mission and Hospital in Malawi and the Trans-African Division where he helped manage a fleet of seven mission airplanes. He flew into large cities as well as back-country gravel strips. The type of flying he did included medical evacuations, transportation of conference personnel and delivery of freight to missionaries in remote areas.
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| AWA-PA students with their new instructor Mo Pelley. | |
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| AWA-PA students listen to the mission experiences of Mo Pelley. |
The ground school students saw the twinkle in his eye as he told of a Flying Doctor mission to a remote airstrip. There was no windsock at this grass strip, but someone had prearranged to light a fire in a burn barrel by the runway when the airplane approached, and the smoke would provide the needed wind indication. Well, the fire quickly spread from the burn barrel to the grass of the runway! To make matters worse, one of the passengers was airsick, and was actively filling sick sacks as they flew around waiting for the fire to be put out!
With that backdrop, the discussion eventually got around to lift, weight, thrust and drag, and to Mr. Bernoulli’s principles. The class serves to prepare the young people for the FAA Knowledge Test, but it also serves to inspire them to see the blessings and joys of working for the remote and forgotten people groups of the world.
Please continue to pray for the flight program at AWA-PA.
