A brand new aircraft arrived at JAARS today. Yesterday, it left the factory in Idaho where it was built, and arrived in North Carolina at around 1:30pm today. About 80-100 folks showed up to see the plane arrive.
The story of this aircraft is pretty cool. It is a Quest Kodiak, an aircraft designed for short takeoff and landing on less-than-perfect runways. There is a two-year waiting list for these aircraft. When an order was cancelled by a customer several weeks ago, JAARS was offered the aircraft by the manufacturer if the money could be raised in less than two weeks. Amazingly, hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised and the aircraft, destined for Papua-New Guinea, is expected to be in use in the South Pacific by this summer. You can read the whole story in all of its detail here.
Another cool story about this aircraft is who will fly it. We know a pilot or two in PNG, but we're very attached to a pilot who will, Lord willing, be flying for JAARS (likely in PNG) in the near future.
Matt Stoker, while he was a student at Liberty University, became a friend of our family. He was a part of a small group that met in our home, had some meals with us, and is one of our kids' favorite people. Matt recently has gone through the application and evaluation process with Wycliffe and JAARS and will be going through training and partnership development over the next 20 or so months. We are very excited for Matt and were happy to be at the airstrip today and see his chariot arrive!
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| Matt, about to give his mom a ride on his motorcycle. |
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