A Pilot Paul from Papua story

How ironic that the day after I posted an article on a man with fifty mishap-free years as a professional pilot my equally professional pilot friend Paul Westlund, who had over 11,000 hours of experience flying in the most difficult aviation environment in the world, would lose his life along with his two passengers in a crash in the mountains of Papua, Indonesia. He was on what amounted to a “milk run.” A full investigation into the cause is underway.

Paul was laid to rest yesterday and all of Papua mourned. He was beloved by the people he served. He and I were nearing completion of a book on his adventures as a mission aviator. In honor of my friend I post here today one of his first stories. Please take the time to read it and contemplate the life of this great servant of God. DTS.

LOSING MY PROFESSIONAL PILOT FACE
By Paul Westlund, with Dane Skelton
Papua, Indonesia. Spring 1987

The apostle Paul once wrote to his protégé Timothy, “Keep your head in all situations…” That is good advice for anyone but especially for bush pilots. Our “situations” often run from the super serious to super comical in a single day, as my first flight with a translator revealed.

The path from student pilot to mission aviator is a long and difficult one. Mine had taken ten years of hard work from the first flights with Moody Aviation School all the way through eighteen hundred hours of flying experience to the Airline Transport Pilot rating.

All of that work, all of that training and expense and struggle to make it out to the field was, and still is to me, due to the importance of Bible Translation. When animistic people enslaved by fears of the spirit world are finally able to read and understand the message of Jesus in their own language it gives them hope beyond their wildest dreams.

So the main thing is to make sure that translator can get there in one piece. If something bad happens to a translator all of the work on a new translation can be lost. I had worked hard to be the best pilot that I could be so that would never happen. Now I was taking my first translator to his assignment in the field and I was so happy I was almost giddy.

The beauty of the blue morning sky, the deep emerald forests, the silvery rivers and majestic Papuan mountains outside my window were overwhelming. I thought: I get paid to do this? I kept looking away from the translator so he wouldn’t see the silly grin that my professional pilot face couldn’t mask.

But soon I saw something that rapidly wiped the grin from my face. We were over the village, making a high altitude pass to inspect the airfield. There was a wadded up white and green blur just off one side of the runway. What’s that? I thought. I turned and made another pass. O Lord! That’s an airplane! That’s what’s left of one of those aircraft called an Islander. That sobered me up quick. This is serious business. Bad things can happen out here kid. You better get your game on. You better be paying attention. I focused in hard on the task at hand, to get the airplane on the ground and parked as best and professionally as I possibly could.

And then, I stepped out of the airplane, and lost my professional pilot face for the second time that day. I had never been in a Papuan mountain village before. It was National Geographic in living color right in front of me! The men were wearing their only clothing, tall, thin, conical shaped gourds fitted over their genitals, tied just below the waste and pointing straight up. And the women were in grass skirts. Only they weren’t skirts, more like flat, dried, twelve inch blades of grass stacked atop one another and folded in half and tied over a string that circled the waist. And that was it. Nothing else.

It was more than this modest mid-western preacher’s boy could take! I joke with my friends that where I come from we take showers in our clothes! I could feel my face going full red. I turned around and stuck my head in the cockpit and studied my map. I wrote in my log book. I inspected the airplane! Anything I could do to keep my eyes off of the people. I couldn’t eat the rest of the day. I was just toast! This is a whole nother world, I thought. Have I landed on Mars or something? It took a long time for me to regain my composure.

The Papuan people are like anybody else on the planet. When they see an improvement on life they want it. Today, with better transportation and the availability of baled used clothing for pennies on the pound more Papuan people groups are wearing clothes. They really like wearing them because the mountains get cold. But they weren’t wearing them on that day and I was embarrassed.

Now, after twenty-five years on the field, the Papuan people are very dear to me. I no longer notice what they are wearing but what is in their hearts. And I keep my professional pilot face in place…most of the time.