The plan was to refuel the plane at San Ramon and then fly on to Pucallpa, two hundred miles to the north. However, the weather did not cooperate. Low clouds closed in around San Ramon, bringing with them rain. It was not until five days later, on Christmas Day 1946, that Betty was finally able to take off again.
Betty was able to use the Rio Pachitea as her guide, flying above it and following its course almost all the way to Pucallpa. As she was winding down the wheels for landing there, Betty spotted two people below.
“Joe and Jeanette Hocking,” Cameron said, pointing in the direction of the couple. “We’re in for a treat. Jeanette is the best cook this side of the Andes.”
Cameron was right. Jeanette had a wonderful Christmas dinner of roast duck and vegetables waiting for them.
Over the next few days, Betty perfected taking off and landing on water, using a stretch of the river near Pucallpa. The biggest hazard was the partially submerged logs that could rip the bottom out of the airplane’s floats in an instant, sinking the Grumman Duck. Betty tried her best to spot these hazards, and she prayed hard, too! Once everything checked out with landing and taking off on water, there was plenty of work for Betty and Amauta to do. Wycliffe missionaries needed to be ferried to and from the new camps that were being created in the Amazon jungle. By the end of January, Betty had completed twenty-three flights over the jungle.
At the end of January, Betty returned to Lima, where a large celebration was held to honor the Peruvian Air Force and the role it was playing in helping Wycliffe. At the celebration, Betty was presented with a pin commemorating her as the first woman to pilot a plane across the Andes. Betty felt a strange sense of justice in receiving the honor, given the doubts General Powell had expressed about her ability to fly the Grumman Duck.
After several days in Lima, it was back to the jungle to transport more Wycliffe missionaries. Betty had been doing this for several months when Larry Montgomery, the lieutenant who had greeted her on her arrival in Lima, came to join her as second pilot and aircraft mechanic. Larry had been discharged from the military and had joined MAF. Naturally, Betty was delighted to have him. It relieved her of some of her flying duties, and there was now someone to regularly service and maintain the airplane.
During their times flying the Grumman Duck, they both noticed a slight vibration in the engine. While they were staying in the town of Iquitos, Larry decided to do some engine maintenance. In the midst of the work, he received an urgent message that his family needed him in Lima as soon as possible. He booked a flight to Lima on a commercial airliner and reported to Betty on the state of the engine. His last words echoed in her mind as she dropped him off at the airport: “Don’t fly unless you have to.”
While Betty would have liked to have had the aircraft at her disposal, she understood Larry’s need to leave. Besides, he would be back in a few days, and most likely there would be no need for any emergency flights while he was gone. However, that was not to be. On June 15, 1947, the commandant of Itaya Military Base contacted Betty. “The situation does not look good,” he said. “Two of my men took off in a plane several hours ago for a short flight. They have not returned and would have run out of fuel by now. I’m sure they must have gone down somewhere over the jungle.”
“Was it a float plane?” Betty asked hopefully, thinking that if it was, they might have been able to land on one of the rivers.
“No, it was not,” he replied grimly.
Betty’s mind raced. What should she do? Larry Montgomery had told her to fly only if she had to. Was this an emergency worth the risk of flying the Grumman Duck? When she thought about the men possibly lying injured in the twisted wreckage of a crashed airplane, she knew she had to take the risk and try to find them. The commandant was grateful.
As soon as the airplane was fueled, Betty began flying low over the rivers near the military base. In the vast green carpet of the Amazon jungle, most pilots used the rivers as points of reference to navigate from. After five hours of flying, the shadows across the jungle were lengthening, and Betty knew it was time to head back for the night. Although she had not located the crashed plane or the two men, at least the Grumman Duck’s engine had run perfectly.
The following morning, Betty took to the skies again, this time with the commandant in the cockpit behind her acting as a spotter. Another man, Francisco, rode in the plane’s hold. They searched for three hours along the Rio Napo. With each passing hour, their hopes of finding the downed airplane dimmed. Finally, the commandant suggested they return to Iquitos to reassess the situation. Betty heaved a sigh of relief. While the Grumman Duck was performing flawlessly, she couldn’t get Larry Montgomery’s last words to her out of her mind. She climbed to two thousand feet and began the return trip, following the Rio Napo as she did so, hoping her two passengers would catch a glimpse of something below.
Betty noted the approaching bend in the Rio Napo. This meant they were nearing the town of Oro Blanco and were right on course for the return flight. Then suddenly there was silence. Total silence. The plane’s engine had quit. Betty heard the commandant gasp behind her. She knew she had to remain calm; their lives depended on it. She tried to start the engine again. Nothing happened, and they were losing altitude fast. In less than a minute they would hit the ground. Betty scanned the scene in front of her. The bend in the river made the stretch of water where she estimated they would come down too short to land on. She said a quick prayer under her breath and tried the engine one last time. The engine sputtered to life, and Betty pulled back on the joystick to gain more altitude. The heavy plane climbed about twenty feet before the engine fell silent again. However, with the few moments of power it had given, Betty realized she now had enough altitude to glide the plane past the bend in the river to a stretch of water she could put the plane down on. She quickly made the course adjustment and prepared for an emergency landing.
Bang! The Grumman Duck’s floats hit the water, and the plane was dragged to a quick stop. Within a minute of flying at two thousand feet in the air, it was floating on the waters of Rio Napo.
The commandant clambered out of the rear cockpit and onto the lower left wing. His face was white with shock. “Señorita,” he called to Betty, “how can you be so calm at a time like this?”
“God was with us,” Betty replied. “He has brought us safely to the ground.”
The commandant nodded as the color began to return to his face. “It is as you say!” he said.
Betty had just begun to ponder how to get the powerless airplane to the side of the river when a canoe paddled by two Indian men emerged from the jungle overhang at the edge of the river. The men smiled and waved cheerfully, and when they spotted Francisco, they called him by name.
“There’s a rope in the hold,” Betty yelled to Francisco. “Tie one end to the cleat on the front of the right float and give the other end to the men. Ask them to drag us ashore.”
Francisco nodded, and soon Amauta had been towed to the water’s edge, where she was tied to a huge ironwood tree.
The commandant was unable to contact anyone back at base on the radio. The three of them settled down to eat their emergency rations and spend a restless night in the airplane, hoping the atmospheric conditions in the morning would allow them to get a radio transmission through to base. That is exactly what happened, and a Faucett floatplane was dispatched to collect them. Several military men were left to float the Grumman Duck back along the rivers to Iquitos.
By the time the plane finally arrived back at Iquitos, Larry Montgomery had returned and was waiting to see what had gone wrong. He made a quick check of the engine and found the main pinion gear had been broken. As he examined the engine, he could not figure out how Betty had managed to get it started again to give her the few seconds of power she needed to make a safe landing.
The damage to the engine was irreparable. A replacement engine would need to be fitted to the plane, and the nearest one was located in Panama. It would take about two months to ship it to Peru from there.
Betty expected to fly the airplane again as soon as it was fitted with its new engine, but it wasn’t to be. Her flight over the Rio Napo was the last flight she ever took in the Grumman Duck. A week after the engine failure, she received a letter from home. Her father was not well, and her mother was having a difficult time coping. Betty felt she should go home and help her mother out for a while.
Betty was sure that Larry Montgomery would be able to carry on the work she had begun. Besides, the vision of MAF and Wycliffe Bible Translators was changing. Wycliffe had decided it needed airplanes that would service only its many outposts as well as meet any obligations it had to the Peruvian government. At the same time, MAF had made a commitment to serve missionaries from any denomination or group who were working in a particular area. In the meantime, Cameron Townsend decided to start JAARS (Jungle Aviation And Radio Service), a fully fledged branch of Wycliffe Bible Translators. He had invited Betty to help found this new organization. As flattered as she was by the invitation, she declined. Her heart was with MAF and its vision of serving all missionaries and mission organizations around the world. Betty returned to Los Angeles for a debriefing with MAF and then traveled to Seattle to check on her parents.
Chapter 11
A New Assignment
It was not until she was back home in Evergreen Point that Betty realized just how exhausting the previous two years of pioneering missionary aviation had been. So while she kept in close communication with Missionary Aviation Fellowship and continued to serve on its board of directors, she felt she needed a change of pace.
In the fall of 1948, Betty enrolled in a master’s degree program at the University of Washington. She majored in Latin American studies, having developed a strong interest in Latin culture during her time in Mexico and Peru.
During vacations she traveled to Los Angeles to work in the MAF office. She also ferried two MAF airplanes to Mexico, one in January and another in July 1950. Wherever she went, Betty was an enthusiastic ambassador for MAF, speaking about the opportunities for service that existed within the organization.
During this time, Betty also made friends with David and Annette Weyerhaeuser, who owned a huge lumber company in the Northwest. It was through their friendship with Betty that the Weyerhaeusers decided to donate their Stinson Voyager aircraft to MAF for use in Ecuador. Betty was even more pleased about the donation when she learned that Nate Saint would be the one flying it. Nate was the person who had single-handedly rebuilt the crashed Waco biplane in Mexico. He and his wife, Marj, were now heading up MAF’s new work in the Ecuadorian Oriente. From her work in Peru, Betty knew just how much help a light single-engine plane like the Stinson would be.
In December 1950, Grady Parrott asked Betty to consider relieving pilot Clarence “Soddy” Soderberg, who for the past four years had been flying for the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) on loan from MAF. The work in Nigeria had grown to a point where Soddy’s airplane was not enough, and a second pilot, John Clay, and a second airplane had joined Soddy there. Now Soddy and his wife, Alice, were due to return to the United States for a two-year furlough. Betty eagerly accepted the opportunity to get back into active flying service with MAF.
On February 18, 1951, Betty found herself sitting on a commercial airliner on the final leg of her nine-thousand-mile journey from Seattle to Kano, in northern Nigeria. Her excitement grew as the airplane winged its way south over the countries of Algeria and Niger.
