Our tagline to summarise the mission of Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) is ‘Flying for Life’. What does this look like?

It can be looked at in many ways, but here are three healthcare and medical related examples that bubbled up on the internet in the last week.

Delivering Essential Medicines

Delivering essential medicines to the world’s most remote places is a very complicated logistical and supply chain challenge. I was on the PQMD website last night looking up some information about accepted standards and practices in handling donated medicines, and I stumbled across an image of an MAF airplane on the site of a distribution programme. Quietly, often without a lot of fanfare, this happens all the time. Yet it is so impactful and it is one of the parts of healthcare that I am very passionate about.

Responding to a Disease Outbreak

This morning I was going through my Twitter (X) feed and saw a post about MAF planes being part of the response to the Cholera outbreak in Kenya. Cholera is besieging a number of countries right now and it is not a story that is being covered much in the press, but it is a very big deal and we have the technology to respond if we can just get the interventions in place. I get it. Not every disease outbreak or epidemic can be international news, but MAF planes quietly get on with responding when it happens.

Conducting Urgent Medical Evacuations

One of my news feeders picked up on this web article in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where the MAF fleet is constantly on standby to do medical evacuations. PNG has vast areas which people live in very remote and isolated locations. A MAF flight is literally the only way that urgent and life saving medical care can happen. These calls come in with no notice as our crew work to respond in a timely fashion.

In short order, three very clear examples of how the crew of the MAF fleet of 116 aircraft are #flyingforlife Approximately every five to six minutes an MAF plane takes off or lands. Want to see a bit more? Check out the video on my About page.