Flying no bar for this blind adventurer
Anjali Joseph | TNN
Mumbai: Miles Barber-Hilton sat in a cramped
positionhis knees wedged
against his copilot, Richard Meredith Hardy's
shouldersin a
fibreglass microlight plane that was about the length
of a Mumbai
taxi. It was a recent flight above Turkey at a height
of 13,000 feet.
Despite the multiple layers of clothing pilots always
wear, it was
cold. A microlight has open sides, somewhat like
sitting in a small,
shallow-bottomed boat, but thousands of feet above the
surface of the
earth. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the
scene, except that
Barber-Hilton was visually-impaired.
"I touched my legs with my hand because they felt so
cold and I
realised there were huge lumps of ice against them,''
he recalled on a
hot Wednesday afternoon in the city.
Barber-Hilton lost his sight when he was 21. A
Zimbabwean, he
joined the air force, but had to leave because his
eyesight was
deteriorating. But much later in life, after he moved
to England to
work for the Royal National Institute for the Blind in
1993, there
came a change of attitude.
"After I turned 50, my brother, who's also blind,
decided to sail
from South Africa to Australia and I decided to go
with him. He's
still the only blind person to have done that. He has
got speech
output on his navigation instruments. I realised that
the only limits
in life are those you accept yourself,'' says
Hilton-Barber, who now
earns his living as a motivational speaker.
Many adventures later (setting a record in the
Malaysian Grand
Prix, climbing 17,500 feet up the Himalayas and
hauling a sledge 250
miles across Antartica among other feats),
Hilton-Barber returned to
his original loveflying. He trained as a microlight
pilot and told
Standard Chartered that he wanted to fly from London
to Sydney to
raise funds
for their 'Seeing is Believing' campaign, which aims
at restoring
sight or prevent avoidable blindness and targets 10
million people by
World Sight Day 2010.
Voice-activated navigation software was developed
for the journey,
and with a co-pilot, Hilton-Barber was able to begin
the journey
that's so far taken him through Europe, Turkey, Saudi
Arabia and will
lead him on through Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore
to Australia. (A
daily blog of the journey can be found at
www.mileshilton-barber.com).
Meeting people in the countries he's travelled is as
enriching as
the flying, he said "Whether it's firemen in Saudi
Arabia who shared
wonderful meals with us, or people in India who have
been so warm, it
really shows that people all over the world want the
same basic
things. There should be less isolation,'' signed off
the adventurer.
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