August 2013 – On Thursday evening, August 8, Tulip City Air Service hosted the dedication of Mission Aviation Fellowship’s (MAF) new KODIAK airplane for Service in Indonesia.
MAF’s newest missionary airplane landed at the West Michigan Regional Airport in Holland and was dedicated for service in a special public ceremony.
This exciting new aircraft will join the MAF fleet in Indonesia, where it will serve the people who live and work in isolated mountain villages. It will carry missionaries, medical teams, relief workers, Bible translators, and the sick or injured.
“Indonesia is an extremely mountainous area, and so many people and villages are left isolated by the terrain,” said John Boyd, MAF president and CEO. “This new KODIAK will allow MAF to ‘move mountains’ so to speak … to bring the Gospel and the hope of a better life to these remote areas.”
Mission Aviation Fellowship (www.maf.org) is a family of organizations with a singular mission: to share the love of Jesus through aviation and technology so that isolated people may be physically and spiritually transformed. With a fleet of 136 light aircraft, MAF serves churches, medical teams, missionaries, relief agencies and others working to make life better in the most remote corners of the world.
Like many MAF airplanes, they burn aviation gasoline (avgas), which has become expensive and difficult to obtain—the ministry sometimes pays $15 per gallon or more for fuel. The KODIAK burns jet fuel, which is much less costly and more readily available than avgas.
“I recently learned of a double medical evacuation flight that MAF performed in Kalimantan, Indonesia,” said Boyd. “A truck went over the edge of a mountain road and rolled about 75 feet to the bottom of the ravine. Two badly injured men and their family members boarded the Kalimantan program’s KODIAK—the patients on blankets, strapped to the floor. A little over an hour later they were receiving life-saving treatment in the city of Tarakan.”
Boyd adds, “This would have been impossible with one of our smaller planes, which aren’t able to carry that much weight or that many people for such a distance. But the KODIAK can handle it.”
To learn how you can help send these airplanes to Indonesia, visit www.maf.org/kodiak.
