Date: June 11, 1965
Location: Lock Haven, PA
By: —
Newspaper: The Express
Page: 3
As part of a project of a new organization—UMATT—standing for United Missionary Air Training and Transportation, Max Conrad has delivered a plane from St. Louis to Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa. Mr. Conrad flew a Cessna 206 Sky wagon to Africa, where the plane will become part of a regularly scheduled airline service in the northern frontier district of Kenya. The planes there will carry food and medicine, doctors, nurses, agricultural advisors, relief program directors and others on their round in that isolated section. While UMATT combines the programs of the Marianists (lay brothers and priests of the Society of Mary), the St. Patrick’s Missionary Society, and the Medical Missionaries of Mary, who are active in Kenya, it will support men of all faiths. A small group of St. Louis business men, inspired by Bishop Joseph B. Houlihan of the Missionary Society, started in 1963 to bring help to 200,000 famine stricken nomads of the Tarkhana Desert Area in northern Kenya. The Cessna follows an earlier effort when a Piper Cub plane was donated to Sister M. Michael Therese, “The Flying Nun” who used it in ministering to the Turfchana people. Brother Michael Stimac S. M., who will be the full-time pilot in Africa, expects to meet Mr. Conrad in Rome and fly with him to Kenya. He will then take Mr. Conrad on a tour of the remote desert area. This is the first of three planes which will be donated. In addition to the airlift program, UMATT also is sponsoring an expanded aviation program in a boys’ school in Kenya where future African leaders are being trained in pre-flight, radio, and other aviation topics.
CAPTION: CONRAD OFF ON AFRICAN FLIGHT – William D. Edward (left) and Joseph G. Fabrick (right), St. Louis business men who founded the United Missionary Air Training and Transport group, say good-bye to Max Conrad as he was about to take-off from St. Louis to deliver this Cessna plane to Nairobi, Kenya. It will-be used by the missionaries supported’ by UMATT in their work on the northwest frontier.