Missionary pilot: Tracy Hamer
A decision: Pastry chef or pilot?
By Evan Wick
If you’ve ever flown through Southeast Alaska you’ve probably heard Tracy Hamer on the radio. She’s either hauling freight and passengers to remote communities in a de Havilland Beaver, or showing passengers the Misty Fjords National Monument in the de Havilland Otter. Hamer has also applied her floatplane skills to providing medical transportation to communities in Papua New Guinea.
Fresh out of high school and equipped with a job assessment test that suggested she make a career as a pastry chef or pilot, Hamer started her lifetime journey at an aviation summer camp at Daniel Webster College. Now Hamer, a Liberty University graduate, has flown and seen some of the most beautiful and unforgiving areas of the world. After flying floats in Ketchikan, Alaska, for Taquan Air, she moved to Papua New Guinea to pilot missionary flights to remote villages in an amphibious Cessna 206 for Samaritan Aviation.
Hamer, who is also a mechanic, flies medevac flights from remote areas to the only hospital in the East Sepik province—a journey she said would take from two to six days by canoe and road. Hamer also delivers medicine along the river, picks up missionaries, and maintains the Samaritan Aviation airplanes. She returned to the United States in 2018 because she and her husband are expecting their first child in September; she plans to return to Papua New Guinea in January 2019.
A pilot since 2009, Hamer has never wanted to fly airliners. She has chosen floats, radials, and remote flying over autopilots, airliners, and flight levels. Hamer believes in using aviation as a tool to meet the physical needs of people by delivering much-needed medical supplies or providing medevac for an injured villager. “I want to do missions because there are so many people in this world who are lost and without hope,” Hamer said.
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