Floats

We are excited! This week the floats arrived for the Cessna 206 which will be used in Brazil for His Kingdom. With the many rivers in Brazil such as the Amazon and it's tributaries, this airplane will be well used in ministry.

Check out the web page for Asas de Socorro (Wings of Help)  Although it is in Portuguese, you can tell a lot from the pictures  http://www.asasdesocorro.org.br/html/index.php. Ryan Joy, their maintenance director in Manaus, Brazil, is a graduate of the MMS program.

Here's a video of the arrival of the floats at MMS.

Friday

In the MMS Aviation engine shop there was a decidedly English tone to wrap up the work week.  Andy Porter and Mark Beckwith measured parts of the Continental O-300D engine they had just disassembled.  Andy and Mark are from England and are here through the partnership MMS Aviation has with Mission Aviation Fellowship of the UK.  They're from different parts of England, and even we tone-deaf "Yanks" can hear they speak with different accents.  They were working under the supervision of staff member, Ian Hengst.

Andy (left) records data as Mark measures parts with a micrometer.

In the afternoon, friends we knew in Bolivia (with Wycliffe Bible Translators) stopped by the hangar for a short visit.  Steve worked in the print shop and Betty taught in a missionary kids' school.  This was in Cochabamba, Bolivia in the late 1970s and early '80s.

Rena, Steve, Betty and me at the MMS outreach map in the conference room

It is GroundCrew Time

Late this afternoon we headed to Zanesville, OH (65 roundtrip) to the Franklin Printing Company.  The latest MMS GroundCrew newsletter was ready to be picked up.  This company does a great printing job and we are happy with the quality work they do. There will be a few more steps before you receive it in your mailbox. The MMS Ladies are busy sticking labels on envelopes and will have a final "push" just after Thanksgiving to get those envelopes stuffed (approx. 5,000).

We're pretty sure this company was not founded by Benjamin Franklin.



Dwight loads the last box



Mid-Air Repair

Our guys at MMS know how to change airplane tires, but none of them have ever done it like this!  Just for fun we thought you would enjoy this old video clip of Gladys Ingall installing a wheel during flight.

Gladys Ingles was a member of a barnstorming troupe called the 13 Black Cats in the 1920s. Ingles was a wing walker; in this film, she shows her fearlessness in a classic barnstorming fashion to save an airplane that has lost one of its main wheels. Ingles is shown with a replacement wheel being strapped to her back and then off she goes as "Up She Goes," a duet from the era, provides the soundtrack. In the video, Ingles transfers herself from the rescue plane to the one sans main gear tire. She then expertly works herself down to the undercarriage only a few feet from a spinning prop. It's certainly a feat many mechanics wouldn't even try on the ground with the engine running.

They Come and They Go!

Busy, describes the activities in the MMS hangars.  This past week a Piper Navajo flew in from Alaska needing some repair and modification. The complete list of work lined up is on the MMS Blog. This airplane is used by Arctic Barnabas Ministries in Alaska. They provide pastoral care to remote pastors and missionary families.


The Piper Navajo (Arctic Barnabas Ministries) arrives from Alaska

As you can see, our guys didn't waste any time getting down to work on the Navajo

At the same time, MMS was also putting the finishing touches on the Cessna Skymaster for LAMP, a North American Ministry to Indigenous Peoples in the US and Canada.This particular airplane is used in Canada. Below is the test flight video. The final departure was early Sunday morning.

Colonial Trade Fair

Javin and some colonials

We went back to the Eighteenth Century again.  This is our final time travel this year and it was only a fifty-minute drive from our home in the Twenty-first Century.  Geographically, it was at Schoenbrunn Village State Memorial - New Philadelphia, Ohio.  My brother, Frank Jarboe, and his wife, Carol, attended the trade fair there October 16 & 17.  (They were at The Fair at New Boston near Springfield, Ohio over the Labor Day weekend.)  So when "Parson John" and "Maggie" are in our area we go see them.

Rena watches the almost lost art of weaving in the 17th century.



Chanelle learns to make a pomador.

 

Dwight talks with his brother - aka Parson John, an itenerate preacher.  A tailor and his wife (left) join the conversation.  The tailor remarked that my clothing was very odd and certainly not in style, but he could clothe me properly for a reasonable fee.



Javin, Chanelle, Stephanie and Scott watch our sister-in-law, Carol - aka Maggie Delaney (indentured servant) do a laundry demonstration.



Javin stands with a Delaware Indian.

A website describing the restored village gives this bit of history.

Schoenbrunn Village was founded in 1772 by a group of Moravian missionaries and Indian converts from Pennsylvania, and was the first white settlement in what is now Ohio. The War for Independence spelled the end of the prospering little community of 60 cabins, church, school, and cemetery. The Moravians had renounced war and refused to bear arms for either side; as a result, they suffered raids from both sides. Reverend David Zeisberger, the leader, decided in 1777 to abandon Schoenbrunn and concentrate all the Ohio missions elsewhere. Members of the Moravian Church relocated the forgotten village in the twentieth century by means of a map preserved by the mother church at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society acquired the site in 1923 and soon reconstructed a number of buildings on their original sites.