RivetBangers.com

Been following an interesting thread on the other forum. One of the members ran into Steve Saint who is the son of Nate Saint. Many of you may know about Nate Saint but for those who don't he was a missionary in Ecuador who was killed by the people he was trying to bring the Gospel to. Anyway, the RV connection here is that his son is working with those same indigenous people that killed his father and is now teaching them marketable trades. And Steve's son Jesse is teaching them aircraft manufacturing. What aircraft? The RV-10!

Check it out:
http://www.saintaviation.com/

Learn more about Steve's father Nate Saint:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Saint

Spike,
Still feeling that calling? There's your RV connection.

Now thats pretty wild. I find it very interesting to see the interaction of missions to aviation. I was able to sit in a seminar at OSH last year on short / unimproved field operations given by MAF. They had some great techniques on how to get into, out of, and how to do performance prediction of these types of operations. Some of the pictures they show of the fields they use blow your mind. I will never question Cessna landing gear again.

They other neat thing is to see aircraft development. The new Kodiac was really spawned on by the missions organizations needing something very utilitarian that burns jet A to replace the aging fleet of 206's. I also learned that the technical ties between MAF and Cessna were fairly strong as the missions organizations really put their aircraft through some loving abuse.

They seem to be very tied into the aviation infrastructure.

I may have already shared this with the group I don't remember. We have a neighbor lady whose son was in the Philippines as a missionary, he has since moved to New Guinea. Luke had a chance to go down and help Jerry for a couple of weeks and has some photos and a story about his trip at:
http://lukeroberts.com/philippines/

The airplanes are invaluable to many of these areas. It literally saves thousands of hours and allows the missionaries to reach many more people. I hope that in the future I am able to help with this work in a more hands on manner.

I would love to get in to missionary aviation but don't know the first thing about it. Seems to be a pretty closed group. Oh well, maybe some day.