Missionary Support Flight - February 27, 2008

Last night, as we were finishing dinner dinner, three men came in off the path out of the dark and up to our porch. From the light of our single 12 volt florescent tube, I could tell they were definitely not from Mayalan. Although they were Mam speakers and had Mayan features, each was dressed in a clean white shirt, black dress pants and dress shoes (with socks).

As it turned out, they were pastors working with the the Evangelical Church of Guatemala and had come to visit the C.A.M. (Central America Mission) church here in our little village. They were trying to find a good way to return to Huehuetenango, near where they lived. They asked me if I would take them there. I had a flight planned to Guatemala City to provide a flight to a volunteer engineer working on a hospital rebuilding project for Faith in Practice, so dropping these brothers off in Huehue would almost be on the way there.

The weather in the morning, being very bad, caused us to delay for a couple of hours, but we eventually departed Mayalan for the flight to Huehue. The flight took 35 minutes. It would have been at least 8 hours by road. My other flight from Guate was canceled so I returned home from Huehue.

In Huehue, we stopped to look at a Piper Aztec that had run off the end of the runway and hit the cement block wall that was constructed at the very end of it. At the last minute, the pilot had swerved to the left and hit a small burm, where the landing gear broke off, the props were bent and the right wing-tip punched a hole in the block wall. Huehue is a 6,000 feet above sea level. Because of the altitude, the speed of landing aircraft is somewhat greater than what appears on the air speed indicator, sometimes making landings more challenging than at lower altitudes. We do not know what caused the accident.