THAILAND: Blind pilot Miles Hilton-Barber flies a microlight plane from London to Sydney and stops in Thailand

Miles Hilton-Barber is flying his microlight plane halfway around the world, a remarkable feat given that the 57-year old is blind. The British pilot and his sighted co-pilot Richard Meredith-Hardy took off from London last month on a 56-day, 13,000-mile (20,000 km) charity trip to Sydney with touchdown in the Australian capital scheduled for April 28. They left Phuket, Thailand on Monday (April 9), heading for Malaysia. To navigate without seeing, Hilton-Barber uses voice output technology that also enables him to scuba dive and email. Using a GPS navigational system he gets a voice output signal from flying instruments like his altimeter, wind speed meter, compass and the angle of bank. Different voice signals can be directed into his headset along with his radio for talking to air traffic control. The duo have so far had no problems on the trip but they have had some exciting moments. "We had ice all the way up our legs as we were flying, minus 25 (degrees Celsius), 70-mile-an-hour wind blasting us, very nippy and being blown around in the sky but great fun," Hilton-Barber said of their flight over the Lebanese mountains. "A jumbo jet weighs two hundred tonnes. This little thing weighs less than a quarter of a tonne so if you can imagine that turbulence for a jumbo jet, this is 800 times worse." The journey will earn the aviator, who went blind twenty five years ago from a genetic disease, a place in the record books though it is by no means his first. He has run 240 km across the Sahara Desert, competed in an 11-day ultra-marathon race across China, sledged his way over 400 kilometres of the Antarctic and climbed a 5,300 metre Himalayan mountain to name but a few of his achievements. "When I was 18 (and) I could still see I joined the airforce but they kicked me out, they said my eyesight was not good enough. Now it's 37 years later and I'm living my dream flying an aeroplane more than half way around the world. So one of the big things I've learned is never let another person tell you whether you can live your dreams or not," he told Reuters. Hilton-Barber has undertaken all normal pilot training and exams but due to his blindness will never be fully licensed and must always have a qualified co-pilot with him when he flies. Organisers of the charity flight aim to raise 1 million pounds from the trip, which is part of the Standard Chartered Bank's "Seeing is Believing" project. The project is on track to raise 10 million U.S. dollars by 2010 to fund simple operations like cataract removals as well as prevent blindness by training healthcare workers and more efficient distribution of Vitamin A. A quirky story.

ITN Source | April 13, 2007

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