The Search for P2-MFC: A tale of missionary sacrifice

Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF) pilot Dean Johnson tells the story of his search for the crash site, where his father, Jim Johnson – also a MAF pilot –died when Dean was a baby.

On this day, 45 years ago, my father was killed in a flying accident in Papua New Guinea. I’ve never written anything about this event or my search for my father’s aircraft. As time proceeds, all memories inevitably fade, and so today seems an appropriate occasion to record some of the story of finding his aircraft. The accident affected many people, and it would be too large an undertaking for this article to attempt to summarise all that transpired from the many various viewpoints. My goal is simply to record the account of finding P2-MFC, largely for posterity, but in particular, for my children: Jim’s granddaughters.

The Pilot and Passengers

On 16 July 1979, Cessna 206 P2-MFC went missing en route from Anguganak to Aitape, after encountering severe weather over the dense jungles of the Torricelli mountains. The Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) aircraft was piloted by my Father, Allan James “Jim” Johnston. On board were Bob and Lois Wilkinson missionaries with CMML (Christian Missions In Many Lands) and their four children, Stuart (10), Marcia (8), Michelle (6) and Glenn (3 months), as well as newly graduated Indigenous Pastors from CLTC (Christian Leaders Training College), Thomas Einana and Anna Telesia.

The Initial Search

On 23rd July, The Post-Courier reported:

“Shortly after take-off the pilot radioed to say he was having difficulties with the weather. That was the last call heard from the plane. The aircraft was reported missing when it failed to arrive at Aitape. The Department of Transport immediately set up search facilities, but continuing bad weather throughout the week seriously hampered search operations.”

A number of aircraft, including four MAF 206s and two helicopters, were utilised during the search. However, due to the thick jungle canopy, the crash site was not found by aerial search parties for an agonising five days of uncertainty. On Saturday, 21 July, the wreckage was spotted, and a helicopter was dispatched to the site. Rescue workers found that all nine occupants had been killed instantly upon impact. My mother would later write in a letter:

“For those of you who knew about this last week of waiting I would like to thank you ever so much for your prayers of support for myself and the friends and relatives of the folk on the plane… They were the sort of people who it is MAF’s privilege to serve and Jim was totally identified with them in this work”.

The bodies were retrieved and flown to Wewak, where my father and the Wilkinsons were buried side-by-side on the headland overlooking the Bismark Sea.

Uncertain Location

Being prior to the days of GPS, the precise location of the wreckage was never recorded, and the official accident investigation report simply states:

“After five days of searching in poor weather conditions the wreckage was found about 18km south-west of Aitape.”

The jungle canopy quickly consumed the site, and its exact location was lost to history, seemingly forever.

My Journey to PNG

In 2004-2006, my wife Kylie and I relocated to Mt Hagen where I served as a pilot with MAF. I was involved in humanitarian aid and relief flying, medivacs, transport of critical food and medical supplies, ministry support work, taking kids to boarding school, and remote access transportation. It was invaluable work, and to this day it still remains the most fulfilling flying of my career.

Personal Search

Whilst the work was invaluable, I was also there to connect with something deep within. As my father was buried in Wewak, I had not been able to visit his grave since I was a toddler. I had grown up without him, and in a way, I was growing in the knowledge of the father I never knew by retracing his footsteps and engaging in the same work. We had both served in the RAAF, and now I was operating into the same remote airstrips in PNG that he had. I felt like I needed to connect with his life before I could live mine forward. By the beginning of 2006, I had flown all his old routes and had even met people in villages who still remembered him. I had also satisfied the yearning I’d had to visit his grave in Wewak. The only thing left was to find the crash site that had disappeared in the sands of time.

PART 2

The Search for MFC (27 years after the accident)

Whilst working out of Mt Hagen (with 3-month stints in Telefomin and Vanimo), I had been making enquiries to local authorities and community leaders as to any clues of the whereabouts of the crash site. For two years, the search had yielded very little. The crucial break came when one of the local MAF staff in Hagen told me that a ‘friend of a friend’ knew someone from the small village of Karaite (south west of Aitape), who thought they may have seen something like an old crash site. It turns out that children walking from Karaite to boarding school several times a year were the ones who believed they had seen it.

Without much more evidence than this, I decided that an exploration was worth undertaking. Locating the wreckage of a small aircraft in the middle of the dense jungle was already going to be like finding a needle in the proverbial haystack. To make matters worse, by that stage the wreckage had been lying on the jungle floor for 27 years. Surely anything that had survived the catastrophic impact would now be corroded beyond recognition and buried by vegetation? Nevertheless, the spark of curiosity and the longing to find the site was enough to compel an expedition.

I rang my mate Chris, another MAF pilot based in Wewak and we made some rough plans. The operational tempo was going to have to be fairly intense in order to fit within the regular flying program that we were both engaged in. We would only have two days to achieve our objective; we had 48 hours to find the impossible with only whispers and rumours as our clues. What could go wrong??

On May 4 2006, at the conclusion of the daily flying program out of Mt Hagen, I flew to Wewak and overnighted with Chris. I recently asked Chris if he had any memories of the adventure (as over 18 years have elapsed). He replied:

“Those memories are indelibly imprinted in my mind! It was an epic journey and possibly one of the hardest (physically) and most rewarding things I’ve done in a 24 hour period”.

I’ll let Chris continue to share some of his memories of the adventure:

“Early in the morning on May 5 we departed Wewak in P2-MAE and flew to Aitape, with a stop in Lumi to drop off some cargo for MAF. We arrived in Aitape late morning and headed to the home of Bishop Austen Crapp, a genuinely decent man who had been the Bishop of Aitape since 1999 (and who sadly passed away at the age of 90 in March of this year). Bishop Crapp had two “farm-style” motorbikes that we had arranged to borrow in advance, so we spent about an hour at his house chatting (and drinking a little Port for sustenance, I think) before starting off on our epic journey to Karaite.”

I remember the approximately 15-20 km bike ride to Karaite being split into two distinct parts. The first 30% was easy-going, and we were in high spirits. However, the remaining 70% was horrendous.

We had managed to cross several creeks, but when we came to the Raihu River, our hearts sank. There was no bridge and the water was too deep to ride through. At that point, several villagers miraculously appeared like angels and offered to help carry our bikes across the river.

No sooner had we crossed the Raihu, we managed to get our bikes bogged. Our guardian angels appeared again and helped us get free. However, it would soon be clear that our troubles were not over…

From this point onwards, the journey only became more difficult. Chris continues:

“The tracks were waterlogged, and the thick, sticky clay made them almost impassable. At one point, both bikes got completely stuck in the quicksand-like mud. As daylight faded fast, we were at serious risk of turning our difficult situation into a very dangerous one. In desperation, I asked you to say a prayer. However, you replied by asking me to say the prayer, which I did. We made one more herculean effort to extricate our bikes from the mire, and it was successful. From that point, it was a mad scramble to make it to the village before nightfall.”

“We arrived at the village right on dusk. The villagers were confused but welcoming. Through intermediaries, we had informed them of our arrival, so it wasn’t a total surprise. Exhausted, we set up our tent and mosquito net on a platform (the start of a bush house) about four feet off the ground.”

“At first light on May 6, we set off for your father’s crash site. They told us it was just a two-hour walk. Initially, I took my shoes off at every little stream to keep my socks dry. Within an hour, I gave up, and within two hours, my feet, shoes, and socks were completely waterlogged, stopping only to remove leeches from my lower legs. I can’t remember how long the trek took—perhaps four hours each way—but I do remember crossing a series of steep, high ridges of dense jungle and slippery mud. Each time we reached the top of a ridge, another one awaited us. It was gruelling. Every time I asked the guide how much further, he would say “10 more minutes,” and this went on for hours. We eventually arrived at the crash site, you spent some time alone by the wreckage to reflect and remember, while I tried to recover.”

Exploring the crash site was a surreal experience. It was the confluence of a whole range of thoughts and emotions. Here I was, standing at the last place my father had been alive. I also reflected and grieved over the families that were in that aircraft. But my aviation trained brain also couldn’t help analysing the site, as I estimated the trajectory of the aircraft and managed to find various pieces of wreckage scattered over a 50m debris path spanning two small gulleys. In absolute amazement, there were sections of aircraft skin still painted in the classic yellow livery sitting just below the water line, which had prevented them from oxidising. In contrast to this, we discovered the engine-block, almost unrecognisable in its corroded state. I also discovered a propellor, twisted and deformed by the violence and trauma of the impact. Heavy as it was, I knew I needed to take it back with me.

The Return Journey

We made the long trek back to Karaite village accompanied by our new friends and fellow sojourners. Arriving back at Karaite in the late afternoon, we packed up our belongings and said goodbye to our gracious guides and companions.

Chris continues his memory of the return journey:

“Our return trek was a race against time. We needed to get back to Aitape, fly to Wewak, and land before last light. The prize for achieving this would be a steak and cold beer at the Wind Jammer restaurant on Meni Beach. We jumped on our trusty bikes, and rode as fast as we could back to Aitape. Time was running out, but we still found time to hose down the bikes before returning them. We kept calculating our latest off-blocks time from Aitape to make it back to Wewak before last light, massaging the figures slightly to make things work. We piled our gear into P2-MAE, refuelled, and blasted off for a beautiful evening cruise down the Sepik coast. We arrived just in time, drove back to my place, showered, shared a glass of very ordinary red wine I had stashed away, and finally went for that well-deserved steak and cold beer.”

PART 3

Reflecting on the Journey

The following day I flew back to Mt Hagen, and was reunited with Kylie, who was pregnant with our daughters, Amelie and India. We would only have two months left in Papua New Guinea before returning to Australia for the medical services required to safely deliver the twins.

Our two years in Papua New Guinea had witnessed the tragic deaths of three MAF pilots. All three were loving husbands and devoted fathers. On 22 February 2005, Chris Hansen and Richard West were killed near Wobagen in Twin Otter P2-MFQ. One year and one month later (23 March 2006), our neighbour and dear friend, Pierre Fasnacht was killed near Tari whilst flying C206 P2-MFP.

At the time of my father’s accident in 1979, the MAF Australia President, Bruce Redpath, wrote in a letter:

“Given the type of work that MAF undertakes, it seems inevitable that somewhe”re, sometime, there will come the combination of circumstances from which the pilot has no escape.

A lot of questions are asked when events like this take place. From an aviation perspective, there are obviously questions that arise around safety, operational standards and organisational pressure. PNG is an aviation environment that is hostile and unforgiving. The list of highly capable aviators that have been taken by its mountainous topography and severe weather is long. But then there are also the existential questions that are even harder to answer. Why did this happen? Why all these faithful people?

The Wrestle

These events and the impending birth of our children weighed heavily on me. By this stage, I was embarking on ‘the wrestle’ of deconstruction – a decade-long journey that would eventually take me all the way into atheism and then out the other side. If my children ever read this, I would say to them that you should never be afraid of ‘the wrestle’. Whilst it may lead you far from green pastures and still waters, it is the necessary journey to encounter authentic faith and the fullness of humanity. Far from being the turning away from faith, ironically, it is the greatest journey of faith. A journey that God honours by meeting you in the midst of the ‘wrestle’ (Gen 32:24).

Is the Faithfulness of Christ the Redemption of Tragedy?

Reflecting on faithful sacrifice, Mr Redpath continued in his letter:

The wife of another MAF pilot, Raelene Hawke, wrote these words as she agonised over the loss:

‘A Sacrifice’

A sacrifice – Oh Father, NO

A life laid down – for whom?

A living God? – my heart bleeds,

He answered – “So did mine”.

A sacrifice – but Lord!

A husband, father, son,

It is too much to ask.

He answered – “I gave mine”.

A sacrifice – it is wasted Lord

Poured out upon dead ground

They do not care or understand.

He answered – “They rejected mine”.

“A sacrifice” – the Living God answered,

“But when presented unto me

In loving worship…… is HOLY

AND ACCEPTABLE”.

In May 2004, the General Secretary of CBC churches in PNG, Ossie Fountain, wrote to me and said that:

“For some months I have been aware that 16 July 2004 is the 25th anniversary of the plane crash that took your father’s life and that of the Wilkinson family and the PNG couple, Thomas and Anna. Jenny and I were very much part of that tragic event. However, I strongly believe that event brought a spiritual break-through in the Aitape area and today there are 28 CBC churches in the area, as well as many others.”

Where have I landed with all these reflections, my dear children?

Firstly, I have given up on the quest to find the ultimate answer; there is only the continual unfolding of Grace. Secondly, I have come to believe that ALL THINGS ultimately work for good when they are surrendered to Christ. And, crucially, that ‘good’ is not always of our desiring but is always working towards the ultimate goal (telos) of conforming us to the nature and likeness of Christ (Rom 8:28-29). How shall all this come about? I dare not say. But I simply proclaim with Julian of Norwich that:

All shall be well

and all shall be well

and all manner of things shall be well

And I leave you with the prayer of St. Teresa of Avilla:

Let nothing disturb you,

Let nothing frighten you,

All things are passing away:

God never changes.

Patience obtains all things.

Whoever has God lacks nothing;

God alone suffices.

The Propellor

I did take one of the propellor blades from P2-MFC home. It now stands as a monument to the tragic events of 16 July 1979 and to all who lost their lives on that day. Its twisted and tormented form speaks of the violent impact, yet it also resembles an eternal flame: the life everlasting for those who give their lives in the service of their Saviour.

“God’s love protects us from nothing yet sustains us in all things.”

– James Finley

“I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.”