Posted by Brian and Bailey Pruett on Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
The airplane is tied down in the turnaround area looking down the departure path of the airstrip..
Last weekend Brian drove with a truck full of tools and construction supplies to the tribe where our airplane is still tied down and guarded. It has sat in the jungle for over a month. He arrived just as it was getting dark and hiked down to the village in the rain on a slippery red clay trail. For those of you who have ever hiked the steep route on Bishop’s Peak in San Luis Obispo it’s a lot like that…only on “ice…and in the dark…and in the jungle.” (more…)
Posted by Brian and Bailey Pruett on Monday, September 6th, 2010
In case it's been so long that you've forgotten what we look like. Here we are...one happy family!
It doesn’t take long to notice that we’ve been silent for about three months. We apologize. This would have been a very fun and interesting time to be sharing all the exciting things going on in our ministry, but after Dylan came home from the hospital we entered “survival mode.” On top of our normal, full-time ministry here and taking care of a newborn and a 2-year old, we had a few extra highlights in the last three months: (more…)
Posted by Brian and Bailey Pruett on Saturday, September 4th, 2010
God has provided us with a very capable and spacious 1990 70 Series Landcruiser. It seats 8, holds lots of cargo and is at home on the roads here.
After our incident and subsequent bent propeller, we had a major sprint to try and do with our truck what we normally do with the airplane. The missionaries we fly for depend on the airplane for all their groceries, ministry supplies, transportation, and emergency needs. When it was clear that the airplane would be grounded for a couple of months it was also clear that unless we could come up with a plan, the missionaries we fly for would all have to move out of their locations until the plane was fixed. One urgent problem was that just a few days earlier I had flown a visiting young couple into a tribal location so they could see their church’s missionaries. They had an international return flight to the States and due to health reasons they needed a ride in a suitable vehicle to get to the airport. (more…)
Posted by Brian and Bailey Pruett on Friday, September 3rd, 2010
We got help from the people in the tribe with securing the airplane until we can get an engine and propeller from the States to install. This is likely the place we'll be doing the work.
We have been working at full throttle the last few months in the flight program on Mindanao. We have been really excited to see first hand the work the Lord is doing among tribal people here in all our locations and how their love for the Lord compels them to reach out to neighboring tribes. It is an exciting time and we were just ramping up into a fully functioning program when things came to a screeching hault.(more…)
Posted by Brian and Bailey Pruett on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
Loading the cargo pod on our C185 in preparation for the flight.
When I was a three year old (or thereabouts) I still remember sitting in an airplane at the SIL mission center in Mindanao and hearing its big engines roar and the Aero Commander start to roll down the grass airstrip. I couldn’t contain my excitement and yelled out, “Weee!” My parents still laugh about that flight to this day. I was hooked from then on and couldn’t think about much else other than being a missionary pilot in the Philippines.
I’m a little older now and my dreams and focus have changed many times as I’ve grown up, but God returned me to that dream on April 26, 2010 at 7:30am. Just 3 minutes after takeoff I flew right over that little grass airstrip that hooked me as a 3-year old. I was en route on my first operational flight as a missionary pilot!(more…)
Posted by Brian and Bailey Pruett on Saturday, April 24th, 2010
No Joke. This was one of the better weather reports I could find for our flight yesterday. If you look close, you can see the yellow arrow points at our approximate route. They didn't waste any words!
Yesterday I soloed on the last airstrip that we are currently using. It feels so good to be at this point, but I am realizing quickly that I find landing and taking off to be the easiest part. In fact, I feel a sense of relief when I circle to land at any of these airstrips because for me right now, that is the easy part. What is a challenge is flying in all the weather here. There is no real weather reporting between where we takeoff and where we land and all of our airstrips are located right in the middle of what our chief pilot calls “the weather factory.” It is always changing and keeps us on our toes.
Bailey is a big help in this area because she is now using the HF radio to call our missionaries and get weather reports. She then relays the weather to me in the airplane via the HF radio. Some days the HF works great, other days it is just a bunch of distracting static. However, it is the best thing we have right now so we are making it work for us. There is a lot for Bailey and I to learn these days about how to deal with all the radio calls and weather.
We recently had a flight planned to shuttle supplies between two locations, but when the rain came we had to throw off some extra weight and give up on our plans so that we could deliver the important cargo to the missionaries who were waiting for it at their airstrip. We took off in the rain and as you can see from the video, had a good time navigating around clouds to get to the most challenging airstrip I’ve ever experienced.
Posted by Brian and Bailey Pruett on Thursday, April 15th, 2010
Even with the missionaries away on furlough, the tribal people were still eagerly awaiting the arrival of the airplane as they always do.
Brian received his license in the mail this week and was able to resume his checkout. The flight we did this week was to a tribal location where the missionaries are not currently living because they are all on furlough. We flew in to check on the condition of their hydro-electric power system and to fix the lighting in the tribal church building. It was a beautiful day to fly and the Lord gave us clear skies and calm winds which was a huge blessing because we were flying in without a weather report.
Garry Barkman, our chief pilot, did the flying there and I did the flying on the way home. Garry is showing me around and introducing me to each of our airstrips so that I don’t have to go in “cold-turkey” like he did when we first opened up the Mindanao flight program. I managed to get a video of the flight and while it isn’t the best video quality, I hope to get some better ones in the future. For now, this should give you an idea what it was like to land in this location.
Posted by Brian and Bailey Pruett on Friday, April 9th, 2010
Our iMac with the glass removed and the LED display rotated out of the way. The empty bay where the old Hard Drive was is in the middle.
A few years ago we switched to using Macs for all our computing needs and have never looked back. They have been really reliable and serve our computing needs perfectly. I had a pretty serious scare with our desktop computer a few months ago when we came home from a month-long trip to Luzon to find that our computer wouldn’t start up.
I noticed the screen was foggy on the inside and nothing would work. I tried booting the Mac in Windows and it gave me a stern warning that I would be a fool to continue booting because it thought my hard drive was about to explode and take the computer with it. At least that was how I translated all the wierd PC talk in the warning message.(more…)
Posted by Brian and Bailey Pruett on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
If you use your waffle iron to fix an engine... you might be a redneck. Or you might just be that desperate!
So here I am, typing in the dark using a battery backup for the computer, but tonight we are not sweating like crazy and wishing we were dead. We are basking in the coolness of a nice powerful fan…with the aweful drone of a generator running full throttle in the background.
That’s right, a generator! We found an old dilapidated generator with an unknown origin and history that was owned by NTMA some time back. I dug it out and cleaned it up with the hopes that we could use it until our loaner generator arrives. It had no muffler, leaked fuel like crazy and wouldn’t run, until tonight! (more…)
Posted by Brian and Bailey Pruett on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
Brian passed his check-ride!!!
Yesterday (Monday) Brian flew to the nearest city to have his check-ride with the Filipino check-ride pilot. This was his last step in getting his Filipino pilot’s license. As you can imagine, Brian was a bit nervous about this as there were so many unknowns – the pilot was one with whom no NTMA missionary had ever flown, you don’t know how much of the test will be actual flying and how much will be oral, you don’t know what questions the examiner will ask…Thankfully, the test went without a hitch and Brian came out with a “PASS” at the end of it all! Thank you to all who prayed for this test! He is now in Manila finalizing all of his paperwork so he can have his license finally in hand! Praise the Lord!
Brian and Bailey Pruett Serving in the Philippines with Aviation 
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