Pilot delivers people and the good news by air

Taking risks for his faith makes this pilot's job a daily adventure.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
HINCHE, Haiti -- Every weekday, the missionary pilot from Illinois flies his Cessna 206 straight into the isolated center of a nation his employer says is dedicated to Satan.
Sometimes he holds a prayer on the runway. Other times this scares his passengers -- as if he'd blurted something like "Jesus is my mechanic" before takeoff -- so he keeps it to himself.
"They say, 'Why do you need to pray?'" says David Carwell, 39, the pilot for Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF). "Well, I don't need to pray."
But flying in rural Haiti does require some faith -- with cloud-shrouded mountains, no radar, few lights and runways that double as goat pastures, soccer fields and donkey thoroughfares.
Better than driving
MAF is the one outfit, beyond the Colombian drug cartels that regularly use Haiti to transship cocaine, that dares to do it every day.
The California-based, nonprofit airline is devoted to delivering missionaries and the Gospel to remote places around the world, as evidenced by a recent newsletter blurb titled, "Pygmies respond to Jesus film by dancing."
But it also doubles as a domestic air carrier in this Caribbean nation. For a modest fee of $30, the company also takes everyday Haitians, journalists, aid workers, atheists, whoever needs to go; although booking a flight on the company's Web site might put off the secular-minded.
"A spirit of evil permeating every level of society" isn't the type of travel warning normally found on Orbitz.
Those who complain can take that back-breaking, eight-hour bus ride back from Hinche to Port-au-Prince. MAF has plenty of like-minded missionaries to keep its two planes in the air.
Voodoo nation
With Haiti's deplorable living conditions and its mix of Catholicism and voodoo, which some foreigners consider witchcraft, ministering here has become a crusade for untold thousands of Christian missionaries from around the world, ever since the first American Baptists landed here in 1804.
MAF says the country was "first dedicated to Satan" in 1791, when the leader of a slave revolt is said to have made a pact with voodoo spirits for Haiti's independence from France. The group says the country renewed its vows to the devil in 1991, the year now-ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic priest, was inaugurated.
Some of MAF's passengers come to preach the gospel and root out voodoo. Some run orphanages, medical clinics or schools, others do both.
And in a country of few roads, many rely on Carwell to get them into the field -- or evacuate them during political upheaval and medical emergencies.
Flight adventure
His main daily flight is from the capital of Port-au-Prince to this city 70 miles north in the Central Plateau, the biggest in Haiti's interior. The only road between the two is what one might euphemistically call an adventure. Snaking along high crumbling cliffs, it is a blaze of white dust and hurtling gravel trucks, a terrifying six-hour journey that carries a high risk of a blown vertebrae or loss of bladder control.
In Carwell's six-seater Cessna, it takes about 30 minutes.
Because getting anywhere in Haiti is usually a nightmare, there is a sense of exhilaration swooping out of the capital with such ease -- rising above the squalor, staring down at the scrapyard shanties, the sloops on the bay, the fetid mudflats, the vast gray city of cinderblock piling into the mountains.
"The day you don't enjoy flying is the day you stop," Carwell said. "I feel like God calls me here."
This hazy April morning, he banks north across the valley toward the interior. The Haiti he loves quickly emerges, so ravaged and still beautiful. He tops mountains scraped clean of forest and soil, their inner strata exposed like bones. Peasants' cisterns glimmer like swimming pools from miles away. Blue ribbons of smoke unravel into the pale sky.
There are no roads, just well-worn foot-paths between thatched huts and hamlets and clusters of fruit trees. Carwell has wanted to fly such terrain since he was young. "I read a book called 'Jungle Pilot' about bush flying and here I am," he said.
History of MAF
Bookish and quiet, neither renegade bush pilot nor fiery preacher, Carwell joined MAF in Haiti in 1993.
The group was founded by three World War II pilots in 1945, with the goal of bringing the Gospel to isolated peoples like the Miskito Indians of Honduras or the headhunters of New Guinea. Now, funded mostly by private donors, MAF flies 56 planes in 16 countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa.
Haiti has been a tough market. The group couldn't get into the country until the 29-year Duvalier family dictatorship ended in 1986. And then, the operation had to persevere through military coups, a U.S. invasion, a crippling fuel embargo and the revolt last year that toppled Aristide.
And the lack of radar. In such difficult terrain, with U.N. helicopters and drug runners flying irregular routes, controllers don't know where anybody is.
And the runway obstacles. Hinche has the most. Its dirt strip cuts through the center of town.
MAF had to hire two kids on bicycles to whistle people and livestock away.
Minor setbacks
As Carwell approaches on the recent morning, the whistlers are whistling. A truck moves off the end of the landing strip in a cloud of dust. A woman with a basket on her head scurries across.
There are so many people milling about, it's like a landing in a flea market.
Nearing the critical moment, a man saunters up into the bull's eye of Carwell's propeller. The plane is still descending. Luckily, the man hears it, turns and races back to the side. Pigs and goats get the clue only at the last second.
Carwell touches down smoothly and glides to a stop. So far, MAF only had a couple minor collisions here. "In Haiti, we've hit two goats," he said.