Jason and Jonie Mellinger Connecting You to Tribal Missions 
Recently a local rancher paid for us to do an annual on his Robinson R44 helicopter. After the inspection he offered to a couple of the guys to use it to build time for basically the cost of fuel, about $45 and hour. The normal rental cost to cover maintenance and stuff is about $120 an hour so this was a very good deal! So what do you do when you need to build 50 hours of flight time and you have a cheap chopper at your disposal? Fly every moment you can! As my friend worked to build his time, I got to ride around just for the fun of it.
I must say it’s really cool to be able to jump in and fly a helicopter. It’s totally different than flying a plane. Flying backwards and sideways is great, but hovering, there’s something about it that blows my mind. Everything that I learned about aerodynamics is challenged when you’re hanging by two 1 1/2 inch bolts 20 feet off the ground. It’s an incredible feeling!
Despite the cool temps, we decided to fly with the doors off. What else could we do to boost up the thrill? At slow speeds it’s no big deal, at 500 to 1500 feet there doesn’t seem to be much to get your heart going. But up at 2500 or 3000 feet at 120 miles per hour you start to wonder just how well that little seat belt will hold. Then into the mountains we go where updrafts start shaking us around quite a bit. Combined with whipping in and out of rock formations and following trails on the ground, it gets quite heart stopping…or pounding. And the only thing there is to grab onto is this little lip over the door.
Though it’s good to get my adrenaline up again, (I noticed it takes more and more danger to get my heart rate up now) the best part of the chopper is being able to land wherever we want. We landed out in the desert for no reason at all but to land there. We did pinnacle approaches, where we would land on the very tip of a mountain peak. And we hovered over some vertical mine shafts trying to see into the bottom. When we couldn’t see, we decided to land, just there in the desert and explore the area. It’s such a cool feeling to set down and walk away, not needing a runway! What in incredible tool this aircraft will be to the missionaries who don’t have the ability to build runways whether due to the terrain or the inability to get the necessary permits to cut down that many trees. We already have helicopters operating in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and soon to be in the Philippines, getting the missionaries and the Gospel into the most remote places in the world.
