Mission: North Carolina

There are updrafts and downdrafts to consider before fully committing to an abbreviated landing zone marked by two pairs of white cones spaced a few yards apart.

The runway is only a few feet wider than the Helio Courier’s 39-foot wingspan and sits at an elevation of 3,706 feet. Pilot Raegan Madoerin will use all of the aircraft’s STOL capability, including leading-edge slats and slotted trailing-edge flaps, plus gobs of engine power, to modulate a steep descent over trees leading to the runway’s threshold. The narrow, semi-flat touchdown zone transitions abruptly into a 17-percent uphill grade along the strip’s 1,150 feet length. Pilots are taught to carry power deep into the landing sequence to counteract unexpected downdrafts or crosswind gusts and to conquer the steep hill leading to a turnaround only slightly longer than the aircraft’s 31-foot length.

The view from atop the mountain is both impressive and jarring. The earth drops away severely during opposite-direction, ski-slope-like downhill takeoffs, and along each flank.

Flights into this challenging airstrip in western North Carolina, innocently called Strawberry Ridge, are the culmination of a new, two-year apprenticeship program to bridge the gap between conventional training and the mission-specific flying the 880-hour CFII and multiengine pilot can expect in the Republic of Cameroon, Central Africa.

JAARS training

One of the oldest missionary aviation organizations in the world is JAARS—Jungle Aviation and Relay Service—whose mission it is to cover the “last mile” transporting Christian missionaries and vital supplies in some of the most remote areas of the world. It was started in the early twentieth century by William Cameron Townsend who found his missions to translate the Bible in remote locations often thwarted by remote and dangerous terrain where his translators needed to travel. As early as 1926, Townsend began believing that the airplane was the answer to help missionaries in the mountains and jungles where the tribes of indigenous people lived. In the Amazon rainforest in 1945 he envisioned a floatplane to support his missionaries. And in Peru, his dream was finally realized when two of his missionaries were transported in a Grumman Duck biplane.

“I thought, wow, that’s amazing, she is so inspiring so maybe I too could combine my love of aviation with sharing the gospel and flying into hard-to-reach places."

Townsend and his family would eventually travel by airplane and survive a crash that helped establish what was then called Jungle Aviation and Radio Service. Land was purchased in Peru and hangars there housed nine aircraft. In 1959, Townsend said “we needed a facility where we could evaluate and orient pilots and mechanics” closer to home.

Henderson Belk of the South’s Belk department store chain gave 256 acres outside of Waxhaw, North Carolina, south of Charlotte, to the missionary organization. Today the JAARS base is more than 630 acres, has a staff of more than 400, and has a training base, history museum, and field site for the organization, which has grown to more than 4,000 members in 90 countries.

Just a 68-nautical-mile flight from Charlotte is Avery County Airport (7A8), in the rural and mountainous corner of western North Carolina on the Tennessee border. The airport has one 3,000-foot-long paved runway, a grass strip, and a helipad. JAARS has used Avery County Airport/Morrison Field (7A8) as a training facility since 1974. It is the site of the organization’s annual “Mountain Week,” where pilot trainees spend 10 days honing their skills in the mountains, sharing meals and housing, and practicing flying as close to what they will experience on their rainforest missions as the shadow of Grandfather Mountain, fluctuating mountain fog and wind, and steep grades can provide.

‘Fascinating life’

Finishing her training at Strawberry Ridge is Raegan Madoerin, a Texan who started her aviation journey with a Young Eagles flight at the age of 9 and who attended JAARS Camp Aero for teens in Waxaw 10 years ago this summer at age 15. She always wanted to be a pilot and always wanted to be a missionary.

“I found a book about a wonderful lady named Betty Greene,” Madoerin says. “She was the first Mission Aviation Fellowship pilot and also helped JAARS get started. I thought, wow, that’s amazing, she is so inspiring so maybe I too could combine my love of aviation with sharing the gospel and flying into hard-to-reach places.”

Women figure prominently in mission aviation. Greene was, as Madoerin said, the first female pilot for MAF and a founding member of JAARS. A member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II, Greene flew a 1933 Waco biplane for MAF. Today, JAARS pilot and director of fixed wing training—and Madoerin’s mentor—is Rachael Stoner. She and her husband, Dan, are both pilots and mechanics and have been working with JAARS since 2017.

“I found out about aviation when I was in junior high,” Stoner said. “We went to a local airport, and my brother won a free airplane ride. I tried my hardest for him to give it to me, but he wouldn’t. So the next year I asked my mom to take me back and I took my own money. They put me in the front seat of a Helio Courier and it was JAARS doing general PR work. They said take the controls and 12 minutes later it was over, but the pilot gave me a logbook entry on a piece of paper. I was 14 years old and I still have that little piece of paper in my logbook.”

Stoner is now a CFII with JAARS and instructs in the Cessna 206 and 172. She flies operationally in the Helio Courier as needed.

“Living overseas and serving as a missionary pilot is an absolutely fascinating life,” she said. “My husband and I served for a short time as interns in Papua New Guinea. Our son Isaac was two and a half years old at the time and then we went and served in Togo, West Africa, and then we flew the Cessna 206 in Cameroon for JAARS.” She said living oversees as a missionary pilot, they faced language barriers and uncertainty over customs and cultural expectations. “It’s very humbling….But then it goes from being a terrifying experience to one that you just don’t want to leave.”

Many of the locations JAARS aims to reach with the Bible translation movement are in mountainous regions of Africa and eastern Indonesia, so the trainees need to know what to expect, Stoner said. “So, we’re here giving them that mountain exposure training and preparing them to go and serve as pilots overseas.”

Preparing for graduation

Madoerin, who helped pay for her flying with an AOPA scholarship, will be landing and taking off from Strawberry Ridge, a steep mountainside airfield near the aptly named town of Little Switzerland, elevation 3,468 feet. Checkout instructor Steve Bevelhymer is keeping a close eye on the Louisiana Tech graduate and she exudes confidence and poise as the mountainside she will land on fills the windscreen. Discipline, standardization, and emergency procedures are drilled into JAARS trainees while they learn how to operate in the mountains, handle short airstrips, or assess unimproved airfields.

Just before takeoff, Madoerin repeats the mantras learned during “Mountain Week” while her hands fly in different directions reaching to touch the fuel selector, stabilator trim crank, and flap crank, then pretending to rotate the trim and flap controls above her head so she can quickly react in case of an engine-out on the steep, downward sloping runway, or just after takeoff. Madoerin recites actions for both possibilities should the unexpected occur today—or while on assignment in a future far-away location.

Madoerin’s Strawberry Hill landing scoresheet reads like the aviation equivalent of scoring an Olympic ski jumping run: “Approach angle 5 degrees, touchdown on center of landing zone; approach angle 4.5 degrees, touchdown 15-feet after center; approach angle 4 degrees, touchdown 15 feet past center with no bounce.”

Takeoffs are equally impressive: “Tail/nose height 1 foot, liftoff at 410 feet, climb angle 4 increasing to 7 degrees; tail/nose height 6 inches, liftoff at 375 feet, climb angle 3 up to 6 degrees; tail/nose height 6 inches, liftoff at 325 feet, climb angle 3 to 7 degrees.”

Her dual instruction goes well for the most part, with a couple of go-arounds executed at the correct moments because of wind shifts. After a brown bag lunch in the shade, it’s time to fly back to Avery County Airport.

With Bevelhymer at her side, the two compare notes using JAARS calculations for landings and takeoffs that are optimized for the individual aircraft, weight, and flight conditions, before she runs up the geared Lycoming GO-480. With the engine racing toward 3,400 rpm and the three-bladed propeller screaming, Madoerin releases the brakes and the aircraft lurches forward, gaining speed as the earth drops away. The tailwheel pops off the ground and the Helio Courier trades the turf for the sky above. The view out the windscreen facing Madoerin and Bevelhymer is the massive Grandfather Mountain. Though the Appalachians aren’t as high as the Rockies, they can be just as imposing. The East’s highest airfield (Mountain Air, 2NCO) is one mountain to the west of the practice ridge. Thousands of Southerners learned to ski on North Carolina’s ski slopes a few miles to the north.

Back at Avery County Airport, Madoerin and Bevelhymer fist bump and she gives N87763 a once-over before securing it for the night.

The next day is a long one for Madoerin. She is cut loose to fly the same routines—solo. In the morning she battles finicky winds winding around the ridges before going out again to tackle Strawberry Ridge in the Helio Courier during the late afternoon. As night falls, word spreads through the “Mountain Week” camp that Madoerin succeeded. The Texan passed her solo test to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a JAARS missionary pilot.

Madoerin and her “Mountain Week” cohorts power through numerous rounds of rigorous flying and ground training that can humble pilots. This week, the next generation of JAARS pilots have camped together at the airport, shared meals, and off-roaded a Jeep through a rutted single-track. The end of their training journey is “the icing on the cake, if you will,” said Stoner. “A capstone kind of moment where they have the skill that is needed to succeed as a missionary pilot. They get to come up here where the runways are different, where the weather is not simulated, and they get to put into practice what they’ve learned.” Even though some of the trainees were a bit timid when the technical training began, Stoner said, “coming out of it, they are confident airmen ready to go to the field. That is just an amazing feeling, and that’s what we call success.”