BETTY
GREENE:
On Betty Greene’s sixteenth birthday, her father gave her and her twin brother the gift of an airplane ride. Aviation was the frontier of the day with Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 and Amelia Earhart’s flight in 1928. Betty, born on June 24, 1920 in Seattle, followed each event with enthusiasm and saved every penny to take flying lessons for herself.
Her Christian parents supported her interests in aviation, but when it came to college, they encouraged her to enroll in a nursing program at the University of Washington. That did not suit Betty, and she dropped out after two years. Then an elderly Christian woman, who knew of Betty’s interest in aviation, suggested that she combine her flying with missionary work. “Of course, dear,” she said, “think of all the time—and sometimes lives—that could be saved if missionaries didn’t have to spend weeks hacking their way through jungles.”
Suddenly, Betty had a direction for her life. She returned to school to study for missions and continued working toward her pilot’s license. When World War II broke out, she signed up as a WASP (a Woman’s Air Force Service Pilot) to get additional flying experience while serving her country. As a WASP she ferried many kinds of planes—from fighters to bombers—from their factories to where they were needed. She also served as a high-altitude test pilot and towed targets for live ammo anti-aircraft gunnery drills.
One day she wrote an article for InterVarsity’s HIS magazine about using planes to help missionaries, something that had been done in only a few isolated situations before. When Navy pilot Jim Truxton read the article, he contacted Betty and suggested starting an aviation organization to serve missionaries once the war ended. The Christian Airmen’s Missionary Fellowship was officially born on May 20, 1945. Later it changed its name to Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF).
Betty, who was released from the service before the other interested pilots, helped set up offices in Los Angeles. After the new organization obtained its first airplane, a red Waco biplane, Betty flew it down to Mexico to help Wycliffe Bible Translators in their jungle training camp. Thus she became MAF’s first official pilot.
At age twenty-six, Betty was finally doing what God had prepared her for. And she loved it! The flight into or out of the jungle camp took one hour and forty-five minutes whereas hiking through the jungle required ten days to two weeks.
Altogether she flew more than 4800 hours, bringing medical supplies and food to missionaries, ferrying sick and injured people to hospitals, and carrying missionary children to their schools or to be with their parents for vacation. She served in Mexico, Peru, Africa, and Indonesia.
In 1962 she retired from fieldwork but continued to ferry planes for MAF from time to time. Finally, she returned to the Seattle for the last years of her life until died in April 1997.
PREPARATION
Escape of the Duck
The red Waco biplane was coming in a little too fast for the strange airfield in El Real, Mexico, but Betty Greene wanted the new pilot, George Wiggins, to get a feel of the plane. He touched down all right, but the biplane had a large radial engine that made it difficult to see the runway ahead once the tail was on the ground. And at this airport, an unfamiliar pilot could be in trouble if he couldn’t see where he was going, because the runway was not straight. Halfway down the field, it turned a little bit, and right at the turn was an old shack.
“Watch the shack, George!” Betty cautioned. George cut the corner, but the wings hit the building. Crunch! The plane spun around and came to a shuddering stop.
Betty winced. It wasn’t her fault, but this wasn’t how she wanted to end her first assignment on the mission field. George Wiggins had come down to replace Betty so she could go to Peru and fly another plane for Cameron Townsend, the founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators. Now Nate Saint, MAF’s mechanic, would have to spend several months in Mexico repairing the Waco before it could fly again.
Once Betty was in Peru, she faced another problem. The plane she was to fly was a Grumman Duck that could land on water or land—ideal for the many rivers in the Amazon Basin—but it was trapped in the city of Lima on the West Coast. The missionaries who needed it were on the other side of the towering Andes Mountains.
The military man who turned the plane over to MAF looked Betty up and down doubtfully. “No woman can fly this brute,” he growled, “much less take it over the mountains.”
Betty just smiled. She knew God had prepared her when she had done high altitude testing during the war. She had had experience flying many different kinds of aircraft as a WASP.
Her first attempt to cross the mountains was blocked by clouds. Three days later the weather looked better, and she and Cameron Townsend took off in the morning. At 12,000 feet, Betty put on her oxygen mask. Higher and higher they went looking for a gap in the clouds that would let them fly through a canyon. Would the Duck ever escape? At 16,000 feet they followed a mountain river up its gorge until they just skimmed over the pass. But ahead, all they could see was a blanket of clouds stretching out to the east. How would they ever get down through the clouds to land at the town of San Ramon?
On Betty flew, praying that if she couldn’t find a way down through the clouds, the clouds behind her would not close in to prevent her return back through the pass. Finally, a hole appeared below her, and she threaded the old Duck down through it where she could fly along for sixty or seventy miles under the clouds but above the plateau. When the plateau dropped away, another layer of clouds lay on the basin floor. Betty hesitated to go much lower until she was certain she could land at San Ramon. If she could not land, she did not want to have to climb all those thousands of feet back up to cross back over the Andes.
Finally, Betty sighted San Ramon through a break in the clouds. Gratefully, she spiraled the Duck through the break to a perfect landing.
Betty Greene grinned at Cameron Townsend. She had just become the first woman pilot to cross the Andes Mountains.
Whatever God takes us through can prepare
us for future assignments in His service.
Just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:9).
1. After being a passenger in one plane accident (even though no one was hurt), how do you think Betty felt facing a dangerous flight no other women had ever attempted?
2. Betty Greene had many flight instructors before she flew for MAF, but who really organized her training program? What were some of the things she learned that helped her get over the Andes?
3. How might God use something you are learning to do now at some time in the future?
AVAILABILITY
Come When You’re Called
Two-year-old Loraine Conwell giggled as she popped another peanut into her mouth. She was playing on the porch of her house with some other children in the middle of the morning in June 1967. Three days earlier her mother had given birth to a new baby sister, and now Mrs. Conwell was inside resting.
The Conwells were missionaries at the Sudan United Mission leprosarium in the Nuba Mountains, some two hundred miles northwest of Malakal, Sudan, in Africa, where Betty Greene was stationed with her MAF airplane.
Suddenly, little Loraine began to cough. Then she began to choke and had trouble breathing. Running to her side, Loraine’s mother realized that a peanut must have gone down the child’s windpipe.
“Turn her upside-down and smack her back,” instructed one of the leprosarium nurses as she and Roy Conwell, Loraine’s father, came running. But it did no good. They even tried dusting a little pepper in Loraine’s nose to make her sneeze, but the peanut wouldn’t budge. Fortunately, it was not completely blocking her windpipe, so Loraine could breathe with much effort and wheezing. But there was also the chance that the peanut might move the wrong way and completely block her windpipe.
Roy Conwell could not stand around watching while his little girl gasped for air any longer. He had to go for help! But the closest telephone was thirty miles away, and in that time of the year—the rainy season—it could take a day or more to travel thirty miles. “I’m going to take the tractor,” he said. “It’s slow, but there’ll be less chance of it getting stuck in the mud.”
He got to a phone by seven that evening and immediately phoned the MAF house in Malakal. “Could you come quickly?” he asked Betty Greene. “We have a medical emergency. If I can’t get my little girl to the hospital soon, she’s liable to die.”
By first light the next morning, Betty was on her way. She picked up the child, her father, and a nurse at the leprosarium and flew them 320 miles to the hospital in Khartoum. There a specialist performed a delicate operation to remove the peanut, and little Loraine was on her way to recovery.
But God was watching over little Loraine in other ways that day. The specialist who removed the peanut was scheduled to leave for London the next day. Had Loraine not been brought to the hospital by air, she would have arrived too late to receive that doctor’s help, even if she had survived the slow overland trip.
Also, just a few hours after Loraine came out of surgery, a terrible dust storm struck the city of Khartoum. It was so severe that everything turned as dark as midnight. The lights came on, but then the power failed, and everything was brought to a stop.
“Thanks,” Roy Conwell said to Betty. “If you hadn’t come as soon as possible after I called, the dust storm might have made it impossible for us to land in Khartoum—or the power might have failed while the doctor was trying to operate.”
Betty nodded, her own heart swelling with thankfulness. As a MAF pilot, being available was what it was all about.
Availability to the Lord means
coming when you are called and going where you are sent.
Samuel said, “Speak, Lord. I am your servant and I am listening” (1 Samuel 3:10).
1. How do you think Roy Conwell felt having to drive a slow tractor for seven hours just to get to a telephone?
2. What do you think might have happened if Betty Green had not responded as soon as possible after she was called for help?
3. Tell about a time when it was important for you to be “available” by doing what you were asked to do right when you were asked to do it?
CAUTION
No Old, Bold Pilots
“Ilu station,” Betty Green spoke into her radio microphone, “this is Papa Tango Foxtrot. Do you read me?” She was flying in the mountains of New Guinea in an MAF Cessna with a partial license number of PTF or, in radio jargon, Papa Tango Foxtrot. The clouds had closed in, and she wasn’t sure she could make it over the mountains to her destination at Ilu station in the Baliem Valley.
The static hissed in her earphones as she strained to hear a response. She tried again. “Ilu station, this is Papa Tango Foxtrot. Do you read me?”
Then the faint words came amid static. “Roger, Foxtrot. This is Ilu station. Over.”
“Ilu, from Papa Tango Foxtrot, I read you weakly. How is your weather? Over.”
Betty was on a routine flight from Sentani on the north coast of Irian Jaya to deliver supplies to the Unevangelized Fields Mission in the Bailem Valley on the other side of the mountain range. But there was a thick layer of clouds over the coastal jungle that seemed to be pasted to the mountains. As she had turned west along the range looking for a break in the clouds that would let her cross over into the Bailem Valley, she radioed back to Sentani, telling control what she was doing.
Now she was checking with the people in Bailem Valley to see if the weather was clear there. Betty was licensed to fly by instruments, so legally she could have flown up into the clouds, over the mountains, and down into the valley. But that would have been fool-hardy without knowing what the weather was like on the other side.
“Papa Tango Foxtrot,” came the scratchy voice over the radio, “our valley has [mumble, mumble]. Over.”
“Say again, Ilu,” broadcast Betty.
“Roger, Papa Tango Foxtrot. We have low clouds. I say again, low clouds. Over.”
“Are there any breaks?” asked Betty.
“Negative, Papa Tango Foxtrot. No breaks.”
“Roger that, Ilu,” said Betty, “I’m north of the range with solid cloud cover. No chance to get through, so I am returning to Sentani. I will try again tomorrow. Papa Tango Foxtrot, out.”
It had always been Betty’s practice—as well as MAF policy—not to take unnecessary risks. Caution was the way to keep alive to fly another day.
The next day the weather cleared and she was able to land in Ilu with no problem.
However, a few years later another MAF pilot was trying to get into the Baliem Valley during poor weather. He was flying in from the south coast and thought he could follow the river all the way even though the clouds were very low. It too was a risky venture, but he pushed on. In the poor visibility, he followed the wrong river. Soon the river valley became a narrow canyon and then a gorge, and he did not have enough room to turn around. He crashed into the trees and burned, killing himself and his passengers.
Among pilots there’s a saying: “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. But there are no old, bold pilots!” It means that in flying—as in life—if we do not learn to practice caution, our foolishness will catch up with us and result in tragedy.
God expects us to use caution and practice safety
so we can serve Him longer.
The [cautious] see danger ahead and avoid it, but fools keep going and get into trouble (Proverbs 27:12).
1. Why didn’t Betty Greene use instruments to fly up into the clouds and over the mountains?
2. Why do you think the other MAF pilot decided to keep flying into the Baliem Valley even though visibility was poor? What was the result?
3. What do you think is the difference between caution and fear? Give an example of each.