The Trotmans welcomed Betty back for a second Christmas with them, and the Navigators staff at the house listened eagerly to her descriptions of Mexico and the work of Wycliffe Bible Translators there. Of course, the people she wanted to talk to most about her experiences were Jim Truxton, Jim Buyers, and Grady Parrott, and as soon as Christmas was over, she would tell them about all that had happened. Nothing had been settled yet about CAMF and Wycliffe Bible Translators working together, but Betty was hopeful things would work out. CAMF needed a mission field to focus on so it could begin to turn its dreams into reality, and Wycliffe Bible Translators certainly needed some flying assistance.
In mid-January 1946, Betty opened a letter from Cameron Townsend. It was just what she had been hoping and praying for—an invitation from Wycliffe Bible Translators for CAMF to provide airplanes and pilots to meet the organization’s flight requirements in Mexico and Peru.
Betty could hardly wait to phone the other CAMF board members and tell them the wonderful news. Now, if nothing else, they had a place to fly and a missionary organization that was prepared to give them a chance to prove themselves.
Chapter 9
No Better Man for the Job!
Three people sat at the table in the CAMF office. Betty was taking notes, Grady Parrott was sipping coffee, and Jim Truxton was speaking. “We have the green light from Wycliffe. All we need now is a pilot and a plane,” he said.
Betty smiled to herself. It was true. With that single letter from Wycliffe Bible Translators, the work of CAMF had taken on a whole new urgency. The organization had a mission and needed to find a way to fulfill it.
“First, what pilot do we have that we could send to Mexico right now?” Jim asked.
Grady put down his coffee mug and cleared his throat. “As far as I can see, I’m out of the picture. There’s still a lot of business planning to be done at this end, and I don’t think I could ask anyone to take over that at short notice.”
“Probably not,” Jim agreed, running his hand through his wavy brown hair. “And Jim Buyers has left for Columbia Bible College to prepare for missionary work in Brazil. That leaves me and Betty.”
Betty looked up from her note pad in surprise. She hadn’t even considered the possibility that she could be CAMF’s first pilot. “But, Jim, this was your vision first and foremost. I think you should be the one to go,” she said.
Jim shook his head. “I’ve already got the next six months planned. There’s so many churches I need to visit and so many returned servicemen I want to interview. This would be the wrong time for me to be away.”
“How about that young man Nate Saint, the airplane mechanic? He has a pilot’s license, too. He just didn’t fly in the war because of some old leg injury,” Grady interjected.
“I heard from him last week. He said he wanted to finish college before coming to join us,” Betty said.
“Well, it looks as though you get to be CAMF’s first pilot, Betty,” Jim said with a smile. “I couldn’t think of a better man for the job!”
Betty’s head reeled as she thought about it.
“Now we need to get something for you to fly,” Grady said. “I heard about a 1933 Waco biplane for sale. I think we should take a look at it.”
Later that week, Betty and Grady checked out the Waco biplane. The aircraft was perfect for CAMF. It had a 220-horsepower engine, a four-seater enclosed cabin, and a gleaming coat of new red paint on its wings and fuselage.
“How much do you want for it?” Grady asked the owner.
“I think she’s worth five thousand dollars if she’s worth a penny,” the owner replied.
“We’ll think about it,” Grady said.
Betty and Grady walked quietly back to the car. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money. Once inside the car, the two of them paused a moment to pray and ask that if this was the airplane God wanted them to have He would show it by bringing in the money needed to purchase it.
Almost immediately money began to pour into the CAMF office. A church in Chicago familiar with the work of Wycliffe Bible Translators sent a check for fifteen hundred dollars to help with transporting Wycliffe missionaries. Wycliffe Bible Translators itself gave five hundred dollars, and a memorial fund set up to honor a Christian pilot shot down during the war provided another thousand dollars. Within a week, they had three thousand dollars toward the purchase of the plane. During his time in the military, Jim Truxton had managed to save two thousand dollars, and now he felt he should give the money to CAMF to make up the balance needed to buy the Waco biplane.
On February 23, 1946, a small crowd gathered by the airstrip at La Habra, California. Everything had fallen into place so quickly, and now it was time for Betty to set off on the twenty-one-hundred-mile flight to Mexico City and then on to the Wycliffe jungle camp in southern Mexico.
The sun beat down from a clear blue sky as Mr. Goodner, a Wycliffe Bible Translators board member, led the crowd in prayer. Then Betty climbed into the cockpit, ran through her preflight checklist, and cranked the Waco’s engine to life. The engine purred smoothly as Betty taxied to the end of the runway. Betty turned the plane into the breeze and gunned the engine. Within moments, the Waco biplane was airborne. Betty circled the airstrip, dipping the plane’s wings as she flew over the gathered crowd. After more than a year of planning and working in the office, she was finally doing what she’d dreamed of from that day seven years before when she had sought Mrs. Bowman’s advice. Betty Greene had finally combined her love for God and missions with her love of flying.
The route Betty had mapped out for the trip took her east over Arizona and New Mexico and on into Texas before heading south into Mexico. The first night she landed in Phoenix, and the second in Marfa, Texas, southeast of El Paso. From there the Waco biplane eased its way along above the Rio Grande for a while and then turned south into Mexico. The plane made slow but steady progress, with Betty keeping its speed at a modest one hundred miles per hour.
At 8 A.M. on the fourth morning, Betty took off from Tuxpan, Mexico, headed for Mexico City. She had studied the relief maps carefully and knew she would have to circle the airfield several times while the Waco climbed to ten thousand feet to clear a mountain range east of Tuxpan.
The Waco biplane had just about reached altitude when Betty heard strange little popping noises. Frowning, she peered out the side window to see small pieces of something shooting from the back of the engine. She had no idea what it was and listened closely to the noise of the engine. It sounded fine. So she checked out the window again. Things where still coming from the engine. Could she have flown into a flock of birds? She didn’t think so, but neither could she think of anything else to explain the problem. She had no option but to turn back. The last thing she needed was engine trouble crossing the razor-sharp mountain peaks that lay ahead.
Once back on the ground in Tuxpan, Betty went straight to work inspecting the engine. Unused to the sight of a woman with a wrench in hand working on an airplane, an airline worker came to help her. Two hours later, they determined that the problem was the Waco’s shiny new red paint that Betty and Grady had so greatly admired. The paint on the engine cowling was flaking off, causing the noise and the trail of debris coming from the direction of the engine. By then it was too late to resume her flight. At about noon each day, an inversion layer developed over Mexico City, and Betty did not want to fly through it unless absolutely necessary. Much relieved that the problem was nothing serious, Betty took to the sky again the following morning and this time had an uninterrupted flight into Mexico City.
The next day it was on to the Wycliffe jungle camp, though Betty had to adjust her flight plans a little because of poor weather conditions. Clouds hung low as she flew the airplane over the highest mountains she had yet encountered. The Waco biplane was constantly buffeted by updrafts and downdrafts. One downdraft pushed the plane down at a rate of two thousand feet per minute, demonstrating to Betty the need to have lots of extra altitude between the plane and the ground when flying over such mountainous terrain.
When Betty finally touched the Waco biplane down on the dogleg airstrip at El Real, a large group of Wycliffe workers was waiting to greet her and welcome her back. The workers were also glad to receive the mail and supplies she carried with her.
Betty was put to work the next day ferrying translators to Tapachula on the Guatemalan border. A Peruvian consul was there, and the translators all needed visas to enter Peru in April. As Betty ferried them on the one-hour-and-forty-five-minute flight, she looked down at the hills and jungle below, knowing that the same journey overland could take up to two weeks, and longer during the wet season. It made her feel good to be using an airplane to save missionaries hundreds of hours in travel time and prevent lots of discomfort.
Her first month based at the jungle camp sped by. Betty logged more than one hundred hours of flying. She single-handedly took care of the refueling and maintenance of the Waco, as well as the loading and unloading of it, while keeping a steady stream of letters flowing to CAMF headquarters to inform her partners about her progress. Toward the end of March, she was joined by CAMF’s second pilot, George Wiggins, a solid, dark-haired ex-Navy flyer. George was to replace Betty in Mexico, freeing her to go on and help Wycliffe Bible Translators open up its new work in Peru. Betty was eager to get him acquainted with the Waco biplane and the intricacies of flying it in the Mexican jungle so that she could be on her way. She had no idea of the lesson in patience she was about to have.
George Wiggins flew with Betty on all the flights she made. Sometimes she was lead pilot, and other times he was. While they were in the air she went over all the lessons she’d learned about jungle flying, emphasizing the unexpected updrafts and downdrafts and the difference that humidity made in the distance it took to get a plane off the ground. She found George Wiggins to be a good learner and a careful and competent pilot. That’s why she was never fully able to explain what happened on the morning of March 26, 1946.
Betty and George had spent the night in Tuxtla after flying a couple of Wycliffe missionaries there. The flight back to the El Real airstrip the following morning was uneventful, with George piloting the plane. As they approached El Real, Betty relaxed; George had turned out to be a good jungle pilot. His descent to the airstrip was a little fast and steep, but Betty wasn’t worried; it was easily corrected. She felt the wheels of the Waco bump down onto the dirt and waited for George to brake. Nothing happened. The plane bounced along the airstrip and then thud! Betty whipped her head around to see what it was. The two left wings of the biplane had slammed into the shed in the crook of the dogleg airstrip. Before Betty had time to react, the plane had spun 180 degrees and stopped in a cloud of red dust.
“Get out now!” Betty shouted, hardly able to process what had happened. “There’ll be a fire!”
Betty heard George shut off the ignition, and the two of them scrambled out of the Waco biplane and ran for cover. They waited several minutes at the edge of the airstrip, but no fire broke out. They walked cautiously back to the airplane to examine the damage. The closer Betty got, the more her heart sank. The Waco was a mess. Both left wings had been snapped off like twigs, the propeller was twisted and broken, and the landing gear had collapsed, leaving the plane lying in a gouged-out pile of dirt.
Betty and George stood staring at the wreckage, too stunned to speak. CAMF’s one and only airplane lay demolished in front of them. How was Betty going to tell Jim Truxton? What about all the money that had been donated for the plane? And what about all the people who had said flying missionaries around was just too dangerous? Were they right after all?
