Flying Blind : A Novel

This novel has been a long time in the making and probably began with my father, Bev Jackson, who, with my mom, pastored small churches in logging and ranching villages in the northwest. He’d also worked for Lockheed Aircraft Company during the war and had developed a love for aviation. As I entered adolescence, he left the pastorate to learn to fly and obtain his A&P (airframe and powerplant) license so he could become a missionary pilot. The transition didn’t happen as quickly as he’d hoped, but during my high school years he owned and rebuilt two airplanes, the second of which was a Cessna. He let me help, got me jobs at the airport each summer, and took me flying for hours and hours. Unfortunately, by the time he was prepared to apply to his chosen mission agency, it had set a new age limit for incoming pilots, and he was one year over that limit.
Like me, my college roommate, Dean Berto, loved cars and somehow got permission to rebuild the engine of his Buick while it was parked near the dining hall. We lost track of each other after graduation. But when I discovered he’d become a pilot for Missionary Aviation Fellowship, serving many years in Africa and Central America, I asked him to review this story to make sure I hadn’t “crashed” Nick’s plane.
In recent years, I’ve admired Jim Fitz, a church friend who has taken many trips to Colombia to work for peace between the FARC, other revolutionary groups, the Colombian military, and some of the paramilitaries. His dangerous work yielded some remarkable testimonies of Christ’s transforming love in the midst of violence.
The late Lee Hough was our agent when I first conceived of this book. He believed in it wholeheartedly but was unable to find a publisher for it at the time. I was tempted to give up, but Robert Peterson, a missionary in Colombia, encouraged me and arranged for Hermano Santiago, one of the members of his little church, to take some three hundred photographs for me along the Magdalena River where this story is set. In telling Hermano what I wanted pictures of, I never described Nick’s plane, but among the photos Hermano sent back was a distant, somewhat fuzzy shot of a Cessna 185 sitting on the ramp of the Neiva airport, equipped and painted exactly like Nick’s plane. I pinned a copy of that photo beside my desk as a reminder that someday I needed to finish the story.
Sephanie Boogaard’s husband is a pilot for an aviation missionary team in South Ame