WHEN 25-year-old Betty Greene took off from Los Angeles in a bright red Waco Cabin biplane in February 1946, she could never have envisaged the scale of what the fledgling Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) would undertake in the future.
It took her three days to fly the first mission for the organisation, born out of the Christian Airmen’s Missionary Fellowship in the United States, and founded in the UK in 1945 in the aftermath of the Second World War. An experienced military pilot, she had on board two Wycliffe Bible translators, bound for training at “Jungle Camp”, south of Mexico City. “What a thrill to actually be doing the work for which we had hoped, prayed and planned,” she exulted in her book, Flying High.
Donovan Palmer, the current chief executive of MAF UK, wonders why no one has ever made a film of her life. “Here’s a woman who decides to get a pilot’s licence at a time when women in some countries didn’t have driving licences, or even basic rights, and who wants to use airplanes to do things that have never been done before. She was remarkable,” he says.
Celebrating its 80th anniversary in 2025, MAF operates in more than 25 countries of the world, and has a fleet of 117 light aircraft, capable of taking off and landing in the places hardest to reach on earth. That unreachability is the defining factor in how the charity prioritises the humanitarian and mission work that it undertakes with isolated communities, specialising in what Mr Palmer describes as “the last mile of terrain impossible to reach by other means”.
They transport pastors, teachers, evangelists, doctors, and nurses, and fly in desperately needed medical supplies, solar-energy components, and Bibles in indigenous languages. They evacuate very sick people, who would not otherwise survive. Since the 1950s, they have been working in Asia Pacific and Central Africa as well as the Americas, during times of seismic change and instability.
Now MAF is the largest humanitarian air service on earth, and one of its planes takes off or lands every six minutes somewhere in the world. They fly to international standards, and work in partnership with bodies such as the UN, the World Health Organization, and the Red Cross. But what distinguishes them from the “flying doctor” service are the criteria for their work: the “Five Marks of Mission” so familiar to Anglicans: “To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom. To teach, baptise and nurture new believers. To respond to human needs by loving service. To seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation. To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.”
THE flexibility required of the pilots is illustrated by an episode in Ethiopia documented in the book Above and Beyond, which MAF produced for its 75th anniversary. The pilot, Peter Empson, had flown a doctor to a remote community living 10,000 feet above sea level. He had landed on an airstrip just 900 yards long, to find a crowd of sick people waiting for the clinic, and clearly no hope of getting through all the patients without help.
Those who were well enough to attempt to reach the clinic had travelled a treacherous eight miles to the plateau top. The Ethiopian government nurse who was scheduled to have been there had not arrived. “Can you give injections?” the doctor asked Mr Empson, and, having given him a brisk tutorial, proceeded to set him to work.
He wrote of the experience: “A million people to one doctor. . . It would be easy to get discouraged at the impossible task of bringing healing to all those sick and dying. Yet it is not just the aim of the doctor to bring medical help. We are seeing the deeper spiritual need of those who are totally ignorant of the new peace and well-being of soul which lasts even beyond death to eternity.”
Adaptability also characterises MAF’s work. Its flights brought food and medicine to communities in Chad during the famine of 1982; and, when famine threatened again in 1987, in the shape of a locust and grasshopper plague that looked set to ruin an entire harvest, it offered one of its aircraft for crop-spraying, and acquired two other specialist planes, enabling it to treat 320,000 acres of land in less than two months.
Children help to unload supplies from a MAF plane in Kalimantan, Borneo
Its story is one of continuous expansion. But, while growth indicated progress and increasing trust in MAF’s aviation services, it also highlighted the desperate and devastating needs that were surfacing across the developed world. Where MAF had been forming long-term partnerships with remote missions and local church movements, suddenly the expertise of its pilots and the agility of its fleet were called on to respond in the face of huge national disasters.
There was the Rwanda genocide in 1994, and civil war two years later in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). These and other events brought about suffering on a scale far greater than many could have imagined, and MAF joined with key humanitarian organisations to bring what relief was possible. In response to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004, it made 1114 relay flights, and distributed 176 tonnes of supplies to 60,000 victims.
Demand for its expertise became so great that it launched a dedicated disaster-response team in 2006. Technology partnerships have come into play, too: it has, for example, been able to make solar-power technology available to hospitals in Papua New Guinea, to help them to function during power cuts; to make solar lamps available at subsidised cost; and to develop solar-powered audio Bibles for the visually impaired.
MAF covers more destinations than any commercial airline. These include Arnhem Land, in Australia’s Northern Territories, where it is the only air service with permanent access to the region; and Madagascar, where there is almost no access to basic health care, and where impassable roads, thick rainforests, and rugged mountains stand between sick people and life-saving medical treatments.
Almost half of the children in Malagasy under the age of five suffer from malnutrition. Thousands of communities continue to rely on aid provided by NGOs, churches, and mission agencies, and ferried by MAF aircraft. Two thousand humanitarian organisations rely on its aircraft to reach isolated communities.
Mr Palmer recalls a conversation with Jack Hemmings, the co-founder of MAF, who set a world record for the oldest living person to have flown a Spitfire. He died in January 2025, aged 103 (News, 7 February). Of flying off the map on an intrepid journey to Africa in 1945 with a former MAF chief executive, Stuart King, he had simply observed: “We’re just doing something that we felt ought to be done.”
MAFAerial view of unloading cargo in Marolambo, Madagascar, in 2018
Pilots need a very specific set of skills for what is sometimes called “bush piloting”. Over the 80 years of its history, MAF’s engineers have developed additional safety measures to make their own flying safer, which are now standard on aircraft around the world. One particular plane, the Kodiak 100, has drawn much on the experience of MAF pilots. The Cessna 208, “the workhorse of the UN in terms of this specialised type of flying”, is another of whose development history MAF has been a part, Mr Palmer says.
Pulling together around a common vision is MAF’s great strength, he considers. “We have to run aircraft to international standards, but there’s a high value about unity and working together. The world has changed a lot, obviously, since we started in 1945, but even in the last ten years there have been some significant changes.
“We want to continue to be resilient and empower people to do good and to be contextual to their local domain, but also recognise that when we work together there’s a real power.”
Passengers pay highly subsidised rates towards the real cost of flights, and the balance comes from individuals and churches. “I think that has given us the ability to be agile and to grow and pursue where it is needed,” suggests Mr Palmer, who came to MAF from Mercy Ships. As director of one its hospital ships, he had experienced how remote teams in places like Sierra Leone had to drive for as much as two days in difficult terrain to reach patients to be brought to the ports for treatment.
Passengers regularly carried by MAF speak of it with love and gratitude. Malambo Bible College, in Tanzania, uses it to ferry evangelists to remote Masai communities, something that the founder of the college, Elisha Moita, can contrast with the time he evangelised barefoot.
MAFMAF delivers fuel to the isolated community at Esrotnamba, in Papua, Indonesia
“I got sunstroke and couldn’t walk because of the pain,” he remembers. “I stopped under a tree and cried. With MAF, our evangelists reach people more easily without too much energy and preach the gospel. Now we have the strength to sit and talk to people.” He credits MAF as “having that kind of heart which is with us in our pain in remote areas”.
A missionary from Northern Ireland, the late Maud Kells, who flew with MAF 70 times during half a century working in the DRC, acknowledged that she owed her life to a MAF medical evacuation, after being shot in the chest by an armed robber. She was 75 at the time, and went on to be celebrated as the Belfast Telegraph “Woman of the Year” in 2015.
THE respect in which MAF is held was demonstrated earlier this year, when it was one of the humanitarian organisations invited by the King and Queen to a reception at Buckingham Palace. “There were many, many people there that we had flown over the years,” Mr Palmer says. “Our goal is to be safe and professional at a world-class level, and, I think, people generally have a really good experience as we fly them.
“We are people of faith, and it’s very clear that that’s our motivation, but sharing the objective to do something good means that there is a lot you can do together. Obviously, people come from different angles, but our motivation is that we look at the teachings of Jesus, who talks about loving your neighbour and laying down your life to serve another.
“We’re very happy to contribute to the work of someone who wants to go to a part of the world that we care about, and do something for that community. We want to bring faith and professionalism together as as our worship and testimony.”
While MAF has a training scheme to develop its own pilots, and offers some scholarship funds and bursaries, the biggest challenge at present for all air organisations is a global shortfall of pilots and engineers. “The third sector has struggled with funding in the last number of years from the cost of living crisis and economic challenges. But staffing really is the core issue, as we’re hearing from a number of others in our space.”
MAFPeople gather around a MAF plane in Kimatong, South Sudan
On the operational side, Dave Fyock, chief executive of the umbrella organisation MAF International, has been with the group for 33 years, first as a pilot and engineer, and then as a country director and regional director before coming to the UK from the US eight years ago. The one thing that hasn’t changed, he says, is the needs of the people whom MAF serves, and the priorities by which it works.
“In any given year, worldwide, we fly to around 1000 different airstrips,” he says. “In Papua New Guinea, for example, we currently serve about 240 different strips. It takes really specialised training to land on these very short airstrips, some with slopes of around 15 per cent.
“We always prioritise medical emergencies, and that comes at the cost of other things already potentially planned for that day, because we give those up to save someone’s life physically. Our pilots would tell you there are days that are particularly challenging because the priorities they are based around just make decisions very difficult for them.”
For the pilots, controlling the aircraft — the “stick and rudder” side — is just one part of the operation, he says. “We’re looking for far more than that in the pilots we have. They would be the ones loading and unloading the aircraft, and determining who gets on the airplanes and who doesn’t. There can be dozens of people who want to be on it and don’t understand that just because there’s an empty seat, weight and balance factors mean that you can’t necessarily fill it.”
Pilots must also be be weather experts, determining whether they can get airborne, and then appropriately manoeuvre the aircraft, knowing what is out there. In some countries, they are allowed to fly the aircraft into the clouds and do instrument flights; in others, they have to rely on visual flight rules (VFR).
“It’s a huge responsibility, but it’s one they’re trained for,” Mr Fycock says. “I’m so thankful and proud of the pilots that we have. I’ve watched them over and over again. One of our ‘Five Marks’ is that they do their work with compassion. It’s a beautiful thing to watch our pilots interact respectfully and courteously and yet with authority around the airplane.
MAFThe view from MAF’s northen shuttle in Uganda
“Our mission is serving together to bring hope and healing through aviation. Our vision is to see isolated people changed by the love of Christ. In surveys that we’ve done, 96 per cent in one and 98 per cent in another said that both the vision and the mission resonated with them and helped motivate them.”
MAF has about 700 staff serving overseas outside their passport countries. “We look for people who are willing to spend four to 12 years doing this work. We find it doesn’t work well if somebody’s there for four months, because we really want our people to understand the language and the nuances and the culture so they can serve as best they can,” he says.
The work is getting more demanding on many fronts. With greater regulation comes more paperwork, which requires more pilots to keep the planes functioning, he acknowledges. The same is true with the maintenance side, and with regulations regarding work visas. And, in addition, the world is changing around them.
“It’s a very different day and age,” he reflects. “Communities are in many ways much more connected, and yet in other ways just as isolated as they’ve always been when they’re in their villages.”
Of the future, he concludes: “We are blessed with donors that believe in our work and consistently work with us. The challenges I see in the future are several-fold. One is that many of those that have partnered with us for years are now older, and won’t be on this earth for many more years, and the younger generation has different ways of thinking about how they give and who they give to. I believe that younger people do give — they just give in a different way.
“So, we are consistently concerned with how we continue to fund the organisation. In many ways, we show the mercy of the gospel by the work that we do. And the gospel is never cheap — so taking the gospel anywhere is not cheap. Even when you look at the gospel of Christ coming and dying in our place, it was not cheap for God himself.
“We are there to show mercy. For, after all, ‘What does the Lord require of us but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God?’”
