God's work gets a lift

About 40 years after Dave Voetmann began work as an African aviation missionary in Africa, his dream of building a better plane to visit those hard-to-reach jungle settings is nearly complete.

For the 72-year-old Edmonds man, it has taken almost 10 years just to build the Kodiak, a plane he says will modernize aid trips to places like Mok, West New Britain, and Aziana, Papua New Guinea — places too small to even be listed on a world map.

The plane, described as "the ideal missionary aircraft" by the Christian aviation group JAARS, is in the final throes of testing by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Should the FAA approve the plane for commercial sale — as is expected in the next couple of months — manufacturer Quest Aircraft of Sandpoint, Idaho, will begin producing about one Kodiak a week.

Already, the company has orders for more than 40 planes from mission groups such as Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) of Nampa, Idaho, for which Voetmann flew from the 1960s through 2003.

Jim Sims, an aviation director for Florida-based New Tribes Mission, another group looking to replace its aging fleet with the Kodiak, said what makes the aircraft so special is its cargo size and the fact it runs on regular jet fuel instead of aviation fuel.

The skyrocketing price of aviation fuel, used for piston-driven plane engines, has forced mission and humanitarian groups to consider canceling some overseas programs.

The plane also will be marketable for commercial purposes, with the hope those sales will allow Quest to sell planes to mission groups at cost.

If anything, the plane should be considered a first in aviation, Sims said. Instead of designing a plane with missionary and humanitarian purposes as a byproduct, the Kodiak was designed with that difficult work specifically in mind.

"We consider it an answer to a longtime prayer," Sims said.

Voetmann found his calling as a Christian missionary in 1956 while sitting in the lunchroom at the Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta, Canada. A radio broadcast had news that a group of missionaries led by Nate Saint, an early MAF pilot, was missing in South America. Saint and the others had decided to take the Gospel to the Auca Indians, also known as the Waodani, considered to be a very dangerous tribe living in the Ecuadorian jungles.

"I heard the announcement and I knew, just then, that I could do that," Voetmann said. "I knew I could be a missionary."

A search party later found that Saint and the four men with him had been killed by the tribe shortly after setting their plane down on a river sandbar near the tribe's village.

But the deaths of the men later led their wives and sisters to successfully reach out to the tribe and also inspired many young men and women to become missionaries.

"All of a sudden, stories in Life and Reader's Digest catapulted MAF into the news," said Gene Jordan, MAF's personnel director and a former aviation missionary to Ecuador. "Everyone, like Dave [Voetmann], said 'I'm going to take the place of Nate Saint.'"

For Voetmann, it would take eight years to eventually join MAF with a pilot's and airplane mechanic's license.

He and his wife, Marilee, soon found themselves flying in central Africa, using small cargo planes to reach villages and outposts. Mostly, Voetmann found himself flying into little dug-out airstrips surrounded by jungle with barely enough room for a landing.

"There were few rules at this time on how to do such work, and Dave was very dedicated to working in such primitive conditions," Jordan said. "His aim was to serve people as well as to help build the church."

With civil wars raging in some African countries during the 1960s and famine killing thousands during the 1970s, many times planes landed amid a hail of bullets. Voetmann says he lost more than one friend to tragedy and once was held captive by Sudanese rebels for two weeks. Eventually, he logged more than 10,000 accident-free flying hours overseas.

"I was motivated by Christ's call to share the Gospel," Voetmann said. "But also there was the humanitarian aspect of it all. Flying to the jungles was a chance to help and educate people."

As the aviation industry grew after World War II, it made sense to use planes for missionary and humanitarian work. One minute of flying time over South America could take the place of four miles of walking. With dense jungles and thousands of islands in Indonesia, an airplane is sometimes the only practical way to visit villages.

Mission groups began using planes such as de Havilland's Beaver and single- and twin-engine Otters and the Cessna 185 and 206. But eventually the companies took those planes out of production, except for the 206. By the mid-1980s, without a replacement, missionary and humanitarian groups had to rely on aging aircraft or larger planes more difficult to land in tight places.

"There's probably 700 mission planes in service right now, and I'd bet they're all older than the pilots," Voetmann said. "There are no bush airplanes being built anymore."

Replacement parts have become hard to find, missionaries say, but another issue has struck at the heart of aid work: increasing costs of aviation fuel for the small cargo planes. In Senegal, aviation fuel now sells for nearly $10 a gallon, while jet fuel, used by larger, commercial planes, is closer to $4.50 a gallon, Sims said.

As a result, mission groups have been desperately seeking a solution while trying not to pull the plug on programs they say are saving lives as well as souls.

By 1984, Voetmann was thinking about the need for a new plane, and eventually he turned to Tom Hamilton, who has been designing aircraft for nearly 30 years. In 1979, he founded Stoddard-Hamilton Aircraft, which builds the Glasair line of kit planes. Voetmann says he knew Hamilton was the man for this mission.

"Dave came and started poking me in the chest, and it began to bore a little hole in me," Hamilton said of first discussions. "I realized that gifts and talents someone is blessed with are precious, so I knew I should do this."

After various delays, design work finally began in 1998. The 18-month process included calls asking for ideas from several mission groups in need of new planes. About 50 missionary experts and pilots helped.

"We asked them what they wanted to see in a plane, knowing that we could do some of it but other ideas just wouldn't work," Hamilton said. "Eventually, the plane began to come together."

The pair came up with an airplane with a turbine engine, eliminating the need for aviation fuel. Jet fuel is not only cheaper but is also easier to find around the world.

Even more important may be the plane's cargo capacity. The Kodiak carries three times the payload of planes currently in service, and with a unique wing design it requires less space for landings and takeoffs.

With a completed design, it was time to build. Voetmann went back to the mission groups in 2000 and asked them to help raise startup costs, with the understanding their money would be down payments on new planes.

Soon, Quest Aircraft had raised $41 million — which is not much of a production budget when compared with companies such as Eclipse Aviation, which has invested more than $600 million in designing a similar plane with more commercial appeal, Hamilton said.

To keep costs down, Quest formed a board of directors, including former Alaska Airlines President and Chairman Bruce Kennedy, with the agreement that no one would take any financial compensation for overseeing Quest.

When the first test flight came Oct. 16, 2002, the Kodiak cleared a big hurdle. But FAA testing remained, and that has taken longer than anticipated, delaying the Kodiak by nearly a year.

"It's a complex airplane, and we're gearing for big production, so things have cost more and taken twice as long to work everything out," Hamilton said.

FAA approval is inching closer, officials say. Quest is ready to start production at a manufacturing plant on a stretch of farmland in Sandpoint, Idaho. While Voetmann still resides in Edmonds, he often finds himself in Sandpoint or traveling abroad to help build support for the new plane.

"I believe this plane will be the next generation's missionary mule," Voetmann said. "It can do more than the Cessna 206 and will replace all those aging planes out there."

Keeping costs down for mission groups, however, will depend on commercial sales, Hamilton said. While designed for missionary work, the aircraft has commercial uses, and those in certain industries already are calling. The price could be right: At about $1.3 million, the Kodiak will be cheaper than the Cessna Caravan, a cargo plane going for nearly $2 million.

"There are people that do small charter runs or package hauling overseas, such as UPS, to places like Papua New Guinea," he said. "And then there are backcountry uses and potential military applications. We're talking to many people outside mission and humanitarian work about this plane."

For Voetmann, it will be both a dream come true and the completion of a calling that has been with him since the beginning of his work in Africa.

"There are churches on every corner in the United States, but out there you have to take it to them," he said. "That's exactly what we're doing."

Christopher Schwarzen: 425-783-0577 or cschwarzen@seattletimes.com

Information in this article, originally published March 21, 2007, was corrected March 22, 2007. A previous version of this story gave an incorrect spelling of Sandpoint, Idaho, the location of a new airplane manufacturing plant.