After the cast was taken off, Nate walked home with his brace on. It felt just as uncomfortable as the cast had, but with one big difference: Nate could take the brace off if he wanted to. And that’s exactly what he did. When he got home, he hung it up in the corner of his closet and never wore it again. His back wasn’t weak and floppy at all. The digging and gravel laying he’d been doing had made it as good as new.
Now, with the accident finally behind him, Nate was eager to get back to flying. He had some new ideas he wanted to try out.
Chapter 9
Tin Can Lifesaver
Hobey Lowrance took Nate up for a checkout flight to certify that he was fit and ready to resume his flying duties. After he’d certified Nate to fly again, Hobey returned to the United States.
Finally, after surviving a difficult pregnancy and a broken back, Marj and Nate were on their own, and it felt good. One evening, not long after Hobey Lowrance had left, Marj fixed some lemonade and grabbed a handful of the peanut butter cookies she’d baked the night before, and she and Nate sat in the living room on the orange crates they used as chairs. Together they drank and talked and munched away. They chatted about the future and their life together at Shell Merita, the name they had given to the new house. Nate talked about how excited he was to be back flying. As he talked, the conversation slowly turned toward one of the problems that had bothered him before the crash in Quito.
“I’ve been thinking about the problem of communicating with missionaries on the ground,” he began. “Those times when a missionary needs help and there is no airstrip for me to land or I’m running out of daylight and don’t have the time to land and take off.”
“What about your ‘bombing’ system?” Marj asked. She was referring to the device Nate had developed where items could be put into small cylinders on the wings of the plane, and when he pulled a rope in the cockpit, a hatch would open and the items would parachute to the ground.
“That’s great for making medicine and mail drops, but what if the person on the ground needs to talk to me? I had a long time to think about this in the hospital, and I’ve got an answer. Get your sewing box and I’ll show you.”
Marj was used to Nate asking for strange things, so she brought him the sewing box. He placed it on the chest that served as a coffee table and opened it. He pulled out a reel of red thread and unwound about four feet of it. He tied the end of the thread to a pencil.
“Actually, I first thought about this during a church history class back at Wheaton College,” he said with a grin. “Watch this.” Nate stood up holding on to the reel, with the pencil swinging freely at the end of the thread. “What do you see?” he asked.
Marj looked puzzled. “A pencil swinging in a big circle,” she replied.
Nate nodded. “And what about the reel of thread, what’s it doing?”
Marj stared at the reel. “It’s doing nothing,” she said. “You’re just holding it still in the middle, and the pencil is swinging around it in circles at the end of the thread.”
“Exactly,” said Nate with a smile. “Now think of it backwards.”
Suddenly Marj could see what he was driving at. If it was turned upside down and the pencil was rotated in a circle around the outside of the reel, the reel would stand still in the center.
“Now imagine the reel is a supply bucket with a telephone in it, and the thread is a telephone wire.”
“And if you fly in circles and drop the bucket down on the wire, then you think the bucket will eventually stay still in the middle of the circle?” Marj questioned.
“You got it,” replied Nate, as he pulled a notebook from his pocket. “Now look at this.”
Marj leaned over as Nate opened the notebook. Inside were a series of diagrams showing different weights, lengths of rope, and radiuses of circles.
“This will take a little working out, but I think I can design a system for dropping a telephone into the middle of the circle so I can use it to talk to missionaries on the ground,” Nate said confidently.
The concept was so simple—it was just like the calm in the eye of a hurricane. Nate was amazed no one had thought of it before. He and Marj discussed how to test the idea. He would have to be sure the procedure was safe for both him and the person on the ground. After some practice to perfect the technique, Nate’s “bucket drop” system proved to be a great success, and it wasn’t long before it was used to save lives.
Frank Mathis, a missionary doing some Bible translation work in the area, received an urgent message from the Indians at nearby Arapicos. The whole village had been infected with a disease by some soldiers traveling through the area. One young warrior had already died, and unless Frank could help them, many others seemed doomed to die also. Frank Mathis immediately set off down the jungle trail to Arapicos while a fellow missionary with the Gospel Missionary Union, Bob Hart, contacted Nate to see if he had any ideas on how to help the situation.
It wasn’t long before Nate and Bob Hart were winging their way over the jungle toward Arapicos. As they flew, Nate pointed out the canvas bucket and the fifteen hundred feet of telephone wire that lay on the back seat of the plane. He told Bob about his bucket system. A telephone was wrapped in a blanket in the canvas bucket. Nate explained that Bob would have to drop the bucket from the side of the plane and slowly let the wire out while Nate flew in circles. Bob wasn’t sure he knew exactly what Nate meant, but there was no time for questions, because within a couple of minutes they were circling Arapicos.
At the sound of the plane, Frank Mathis came running out of one of the huts in the village. He stood in a clearing and waved frantically at the plane. Nate smiled; he knew what Frank was thinking. There was no airstrip and therefore no way for Frank to communicate with the plane.
Nate circled the Pacer over the clearing. He could almost see the puzzled look on Frank’s face. Then he gave the signal to Bob to drop the bucket with the telephone in it from the side of the plane. The bucket trailed behind the plane, arcing down on the long telephone wire. When all the wire had been let out, Nate banked the Pacer more steeply and reduced the size of the circle he was flying in. As he did so, the bucket began to arc inwards until it hovered a few feet away from Frank.
Frank ran over to the bucket and grabbed it. He pulled the blanket out and found the telephone. He let out a yell in amazement. He lifted the phone to his ear and heard a crackling noise. Then loud and clear through the crackle he heard the words, “Hello, Frank, this is Bob Hart. What’s the situation down there?”
“Pretty bad,” announced Frank, the amazement of talking to the plane above him by phone sounding in his voice. “Most of the village is sick.”
Nate had Bob find out from Frank what the symptoms of the sickness were. As Frank told him the symptoms, Bob hurriedly wrote them down. Then he handed the list to Nate, who tuned the plane’s shortwave radio in to the hospital at Shell Mera, where a doctor was standing by, and relayed the list of symptoms over the radio. The doctor asked a few more questions, which were relayed by Bob down to Frank Mathis, and soon the doctor had all the information he needed to make a diagnosis. Bob pulled the bucket and telephone back onboard the Pacer, and the plane headed back for Shell Mera. By the time they landed, Marj was waiting with medicine to treat the illness. Nate refueled the airplane and flew back to deliver the lifesaving medicine.
That night as he drank his coffee with Marj, Nate explained the wonderful feeling of having saved lives without ever landing his plane. The bucket drop system had proved its usefulness.
News of Nate’s ingenious maneuver with the bucket and wire spread around the world. He even received a surprise in the mail, a letter of commendation and 250 dollars from John Gaty, the general manager of the Beech Aircraft Company. Gaty was impressed with Nate’s spiral-line technique, as it came to be known.
After the success of the bucket drop idea, Nate turned his attention to another problem. This time it was a safety issue. Flying over dense jungle, like that of the Oriente, was very dangerous, especially if something went wrong with the plane. On May 9, five months after the accident that nearly took his own life, Nate heard about a pilot and copilot from the Shell Oil Company who were killed while test-piloting a new Grumman airplane. Soon after that, an Ecuadoran transport plane crashed in the dense jungle. The crash site was only thirty-five miles from Shell Mera. All eleven passengers and crew were killed in the crash. Then in July, another Shell Oil Company plane flying passengers to the nearby town of Ambato crashed. Again, everyone on board was killed, thirty-eight passengers and crew in all.
Within six months of Nate’s accident at Quito, fifty-one people lost their lives in airplane crashes within a hundred miles of Shell Mera. Each of the pilots in those planes had been more experienced than Nate. The crashes had given Nate a lot of reasons to think about safety when flying over the jungle.
Bob Hart, from the Gospel Missionary Union, was also a pilot, and he told Nate the story of what had happened to him about six months before Nate arrived at Shell Mera. Bob and George Poole, another missionary, had been flying over the jungle near Arajuno. They were cruising along about fifteen hundred feet above the jungle when the engine failed. They began to lose altitude, but there was nowhere to land. As far as the eye could see there was nothing except thick, green vegetation. Bob brought the plane down as best he could. While trying to avoid a huge balsa tree, the right wing clipped a palm tree, flipping the plane over as it crashed to the darkness of the jungle floor. The canopy of trees above them closed over the wreckage so that searchers couldn’t see it from the air.
Bob had broken his ankle and shattered his knee and was unable to walk. George Poole was badly cut and bruised, but nothing was broken. They decided George would walk for help. For nine days, George wandered through the jungle, all the while wondering whether Bob was still alive. Finally, George made it to Shell Mera, but he was unable to locate exactly where the plane had crashed. It took another two days before Bob Hart, more dead than alive, was finally found. Bob lived to tell a story every jungle pilot knew could happen to him if his engine ever quit while flying over the jungle. Bob’s story sent a chill up Nate’s newly healed spine.
Apart from human error, where a pilot makes a major mistake or miscalculation while flying, the biggest concern to pilots was their airplane’s engine quitting in midair. If a car’s engine quits, the driver can coast to a halt at the side of the road, normally with no harm to anyone. But when a plane engine quits in midair, it’s a different story. An airplane’s propeller corkscrews through the air, pulling the plane along with it. As the plane is pulled forward, the movement of air over and under the wings creates lift, which keeps the plane aloft. When the engine stops, the propeller stops, the plane’s forward motion quickly slows, and as it does, the lift under the wings is reduced and the plane begins to lose altitude. If a pilot is flying over an open field or a road when this happens, he might be able to glide the plane in for an emergency landing. But if he is flying over jungle, he can do nothing to avoid hitting the trees.
Nate thought hard about the things that were likely to make an engine quit in midair. It was hardly ever the engine itself that was the problem, since it was checked over before every flight. Ninety-nine percent of the time when an engine quit in flight it was because the fuel was contaminated or had stopped flowing to the engine. So Nate made a list of the ways that fuel was most likely to be stopped from reaching the engine. Number one on his list was mud wasps plugging up a fuel line, which is what had happened on the airstrip at El Real in Mexico. Number two was water in the fuel. Of course, this didn’t actually stop fuel from reaching the engine; the fuel just didn’t ignite when it got there. Number three was cracks in the fuel tank. Number four was dirt under the float valve seat. And number five was running out of fuel either because of a faulty gauge or because of human error.
