“Hey Liz, you did this right? You need to sign it off.” Ryan told me one warm afternoon in the hangar in Nairobi.
“But I don’t want to!” I informed him adamantly.
“why not?”
“I don’t want to admit that I did that!”
“Well, part of being an A&P is taking responsibility for your own work,” he told me. Begrudgingly, i scribbled my initials in the box. He was right, I did have to take responsibility for my work. It wasn’t a deep revelation, but it was the first time I really had to sign off my own work, even though it was a simple discrepancy that anyone in the hangar could have fixed.

I enjoyed working with Ryan in Kenya. He taught me a lot about fleet maintenance and working in a third world country. When we weren’t working, he was talking about motorcycles or watching videos of motorcycles. He graduated from LeTourneau, so we had fun comparing notes on which classes we loved, which professors gave the worst tests, and life in the ghetto of Longview. He and his awesome wife picked me up at the airport when I first got there, and encouraged me throughout my time in Kenya.

I think I heard Saturday morning that something had happened to him. I found out that afternoon that there was a plane crash in Nairobi, right off the airport where I worked, less than a mile from where I lived. I put a few more pieces together, and by Saturday evening, I realized that Ryan had been in the AIM AIR plane that crashed. The official statement is here

Ryan is really beat up, but he is going to survive it. The pilot did not make it. I had met Frank while I was there, but didn’t get to know him as well as I did the guys on the hangar floor. Please pray for Frank’s wife and four kids as they work through this difficult situation. Please pray for Ryan’s recovery and his wife and kids while they are going through this.

Please pray for AIM AIR. While I was there, they were under a probationary period where they analyzed every aspect of the operation and made necessary changes to make the operation as safe as possible. The AIM AIR family is mourning the loss of a brother.

I probably worked on that plane. I spent enough time on the 206s in Nairobi that it is very likely I turned a wrench on that plane. Sometimes I wonder why God wants me doing something as important as aircraft maintenance. Wouldn’t He be better off flying himself around with the angels? He doesn’t need me. He doesn’t even need these airplanes. But he loves us sooooo much that He wants us to be a part of His work. Even though all I do is drop tools on the ground, He wants to pick them up, just so He can stand next to me. Maybe he even wrote the laws of gravity so I would be reminded that its Him pulling the tools out of my hand and throwing them at the ground.
Even though all we pilots do is try not to bend the airplane when we get close to the ground, He gives us a nice soft pillow (we call it “ground effect”) to help cushion our landing, just so he can be there next to us. He created physics so we can get above the ground, to get a different perspective of the earth. Or maybe He let us figure out the lift formula so we can routinely jump into his arms in faith. We call it aerodynamics, but we know He is holding us up, getting us where He wants us.