[PHOTO/CAPTION: Miles Hilton-Barber]

[PHOTO/CAPTION: Miles Hilton-Barber]

Braille Monitor

December

2004

(back)

(next) (contents)

The

Blind Pilot Flying the Channel

by Miles Hilton-Barber

Miles

Hilton-Barber

From the Editor:

Sunday, July 4, convention delegates were delighted by a presentation from a

blind adventurer who lives in Devonshire, England. His brother Geoff Hilton-Barber

had described to the 1998 convention his own solo voyage as a blind sailor from

South Africa to Australia. This year it was Miles Hilton-Barber's turn to push

back the limits of our expectations about what a blind person can do when equipped

with skill and determination. This is what Miles Hilton-Barber said:

Life is too short

to drink bad wine. Isn't that right? Yeah! I flew in Friday afternoon to the

Atlanta Airport, and the air hostess said, "Hey Mr. Blind Man, what are

you doing here?"

I said, "I have

come to teach two and a half thousand blind Americans how to fly airplanes."

This air hostess was a bit alarmed, and she said, "If you are using speech

output, what happens if your speech fails with all these blind Americans flying

around?"

I said, "Don't worry,

they've all got long, telescopic white sticks, and they'll use those if it doesn't

work."

She said, "Oh Lordy,

love, I thought the danger in the air was from these terrorists."

I said, "The National

Federation of the Blind are far more dangerous for good than anything else.

They are an amazing organization. Look out! They're coming."

Let me explain a little

bit about microlites. They are small, open-cockpit aircrafts like a hang glider,

if you know what that is like. The wings are anything from twenty-five to thirty-five

feet in wingspan. Got no tail to it. Two people fly it, and I sit in the back

seat. I've got my copilot literally sitting between my legs. There is very little

space; his shoulders are where my knees are. We are both strapped into little

plastic seats.

We have three tricycle

wheels, heavy-duty wheels, and I steer on the ground by foot pedals, which tell

me which way I am going. The idea is—I'll demonstrate the technology in

a moment—when I am going to take off down a particular runway, I know the

bearing, I've got that on my computer. So if it's 290 degrees south, I get on

that bearing. I've got Storm [his copilot] waving his arms around, getting people

out of the way. We simply go down the runway, and my computer speech is saying

every few seconds, "290 south, 290 south." If it goes 293 or 294,

I know to go to the left or vice versa. And, of course, I've got something else

giving me my air speed. (I will go through all of that in a moment.) It's great

fun.

Once I am in the air, I

have this computer giving me my track, which is simply the bearing, a line on

a map going from A to B, and it will show me if I am drifting left or right.

You will hear the speech just now. It's just great fun.

Coming in to land, you

of course know the bearing. I also have an altimeter, which uses microwave technology,

which I am still negotiating with the Ministry of Defense for permission to

use because it's the same instrument that is used to guide guided missiles to

their destinations. It's still a little dodgy. They are worried about its getting

into the hands of a terrorist, but other people say I am the terrorist, and

I shouldn't have my hands on it.

This altimeter is accurate

to within four inches. So as I am coming in to land, it gives me my exact height.

I don't need a normal one that an aircraft uses. I also have an airspeed indicator.

Going to what I have done

recently--last August I flew the English Channel. We were celebrating the first

hundred years of powered flight in the world. Great! Who would have thought

a hundred years ago that anyone could fly? And who would have thought a hundred

years on that a blind man would fly as well? Technology is amazing, isn't it?

The important thing I want to say to you is that I am a very ordinary person;

I'm just like one beggar telling another beggar where to find a square meal.

Do you understand what I am saying? I am just telling you guys where it's at.

It's for you to go and grab it.

When we flew the English

Channel, there were a hundred sixty other microlites flying, celebrating this

hundred years of powered flight. The funny thing is that we had Skye Television

and Reuters all recording this crazy blind man. I went to them with my white

stick, couldn't find where the aircraft was, so someone had to point me. After

I checked it with my stick, I folded the stick and put it in the aircraft and

started putting on my flying suit and my helmet. All these people were filming

this, and Storm, my copilot, said that once we were all strapped in and I started

the engine, they all scattered. They picked up their cameras and ran. They didn't

want to be too close.[laughter] That was great fun.

Off we went and flew across

the channel. When we came in to land into France, we had quite a strong crosswind.

They're kind of dodgy if you know anything about flying. You've got to correct

so you're pointing down the runway and you don't drift too much. When we landed,

it was a bit dodgy, a bit of a bumpy landing. Afterwards one of the French pilots

noticed that I had a white stick. He said, "Monsieur, are you blind?"

I said, "Yes."

He said, "How do you

do it?"

I said "with speech

output."

He said, "But Monsieur,

when you are about to land and there is a strong crosswind, you know, it is

very dangerous, and you have to make the big correction very quickly. How do

you do it?" I said, "Well, if it looks as though we are going to crash,

I just hit control, alt, delete, and we do it all over again." [laughter]

This man, being a very

polite pilot, said, "But monsieur, pardon?"

I said, "Don't you

have this on your computer?"

He said, "Oui."

I said, "Don't you

like playing games?"

He said, "Oui."

I said, "Well, this

is all the game of life. You better get this fitted on your aircraft, otherwise

you might crash sometime." We just walked away. I never explained that

in an emergency, Storm is there as a backup, but it was great fun.

Last month we also set

a new British high altitude record when we climbed to 20,300 feet in this microlite.

As Dr. Maurer was saying, it was a little bit nippy. It was about four times

as cold as your deep freeze with howling winds. We had a sealed little black

flight box with us to prove what altitude we went to. Civil Aviation can then

plug it into a computer, unseal it, and see the line graph on the computer screen

showing how high we got and prove that we set a record. We had a transponder

that sent out signals to other aircraft in the area. The funny thing is that

once you are about 20,000 feet, you're starting to bump into strange neighbors

like jumbo jets flying in from Europe and America, and we had this funny time

talking with a pilot of a jumbo jet. You know, "Zero X-ray, this is Tango

Yankee Bravo," whatever.

We found ourselves saying

to him, "Look, you might think you've got a little bit of an insect stuck

on your windscreen, but, no, we are people out here. Give us some space. Move

away!" The pilot would say, "Who are you. Identify yourself."

We said, "We are a

microlite."

He said, "No way,

buddy. Microlites flying at 20,000 feet?" I said, "We're here. Give

us space." If they fly within six miles of you, they'll tear the wings

off you, those big things. So we had a great time chatting with this pilot.

When we finally got up

to 20,300 feet, we couldn't go any higher. The air was so thin that we were

breathing oxygen, and the aircraft was almost stalling. I had it on full power,

and we were down to about sixty miles per hour instead of about eighty or ninety,

and we were just wallowing around. I said to Storm, "That's it; we won't

go any higher. Let's get down." I said, "By the way, Storm, I am desperate

for the toilet, so, if you don't mind, we are going to go down rather quickly."

I mean it was really cold. Do you know what it's like when you are cold, and

you are desperate? I had on all my Antarctic gear and balaclava. It was so cold

that my eyelashes were sticking together, icing together. So it was a little

bit nippy. I forgot that I had this flight indicator on board recording everything

I was doing.

I put it into a dive, almost

vertically, an eighty-degree dive, and we went from 20,000 feet down to 3,000

at the same speed as a person free-falling as they skydive, which was fantastic.

It was very exciting. But because we were going from so high and so cold down

so fast, all of the flight instruments froze over so that Storm, my copilot,

couldn't read anything. He said, "There is ice everywhere." Everything

was covered in ice because of the warm air hitting the cold instruments. I pulled

out at 3,000. It was very exciting.

When the air traffic control

people and the Civil Aviation looked at the graph, they said, "Is this

a record of a mid-air collision?"

Someone said, "No,

what do you mean?"

They said, "Because

the curve goes up nice and gradual. All of a sudden it drops just like a shock.

It's almost vertical."

Someone said, "Oh

no, that was a blind pilot."

"What? A blind pilot!"

He said, "But why is he coming down so vertical?"

They said, "Well,

to be honest sir, he needed the toilet." [laughter] I got in a bit of trouble

over that. I was told not to do that again. There is no inside entertainment;

there are no toilets up there, so that's a bit dodgy.

I am very excited about

the products that VisuAide are bringing out, and I am looking at maybe linking

up with them. At the moment I'm using software called Software Express, and

if you want to pick up a pamphlet that will give you my Web address and a card,

whatever, you can go to the VisuAide table and they will give you information

so that you can look up my Web site. There are links there to this software

and technology. The lovely thing is that, if I am using VisuAide stuff, I can

in time listen to my Talking Books when I am flying to Australia or wherever.[applause]

It's fantastic, aye! Whoever thought that digital books were only for grannies

sitting on their sofas in the lounge.

The next thing I am planning

to do is to fly my microlite from London all the way to Sydney, Australia. That

is about 12,500 miles. It's more than halfway around the world. It is going

to take me thirty-five days at least. We'll be going from Britain across the

English Channel down to the Mediterranean, jump across the islands in the Mediterranean,

Egypt, across to the Middle East, the Far East, and then across Pakistan, then

across India, down to Singapore, Singapore to East Timor, East Timor to Darwin,

and then all the way down the east coast to Sydney. The difficulty is that the

microlite has a range of only 300 miles. But from East Timor to Darwin is 460

miles, which is a bit of a problem. So we'll be taking extra fuel, and we are

even sending our toothbrushes on ahead so we won't have any extra weight.

If we land in the water,

there are sharks. What are we going to do about the sharks? Well, the best advice

we've had so far is to carry water-resistant briefcases, brand new technology.

If a shark sees the briefcase you are holding in the water, he won't attack

you out of professional courtesy to other lawyers and solicitors.[laughter]

That's going to be great fun, and I am looking forward to doing that very much.

My call sign when I fly to Australia is going to be "Batman," because

I am blind as a bat. It should be great fun, so we are looking forward to that.

[Mr. Hilton-Barber then demonstrated what his software sounded like.]

The most important thing

I want to say in conclusion is this. I was eighteen, growing up in Rhodesia,

what is now called Zimbabwe. I joined the Air Force. I could still see then.

I didn't know I was going to go blind, and neither did they. But they said,

"Sir, you will never become a pilot because your eyesight isn't good enough."

Just the other day I was sitting in my bath back in England, and I suddenly

remembered that occasion. I said, "Blow me down. Thirty-five years later,

even though I can't see a thing, I now have the privilege of flying more than

halfway around the world." Don't tell me you can't live your dreams! [applause

and cheers]

Let me tell you this: you

can live your dreams. Dream big dreams, whatever you want to do. The only limits

in your life are those that you accept yourself. Get rid of them. We blind people

can set our sights as high as we want. We can go to the moon. If we can go under

water, we can fly aeroplanes. The only limits are those you accept yourself.

I want to say that on this card I have a little thing written, and there is

a picture of me at the bottom of the Red Sea actually using my white stick to

push my paralyzed friend in a wheelchair along the bottom of the sea. That was

just one form of our transport. Great fun. But be creative. You know, life is

too short to drink bad wine, as I said. Life is not measured by the number of

breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. Isn't that right?

Friends, I am hugely, hugely

honored to be here today. I didn't say at the beginning, but I worked for a

number of years for the Royal National Institute of the Blind in Britain, and

I bring you greetings from all of their management and staff. There are about

two million blind people in Britain, and I wish they could come here because

you guys have razzmatazz.

It is the Fourth of July!

You are going to drink wine tonight, not now. I will close with two quotes that

have meant a lot in my life. One is a Danish proverb that says that "Life

does not consist in holding a good hand of cards, but in playing a poor hand

well." I wasted years of my life when I heard that I was going to become

blind; I thought I couldn't live my dreams, I couldn't have any big goals in

life. Now I realize that, if we just play the hand of cards we have been given,

it is enough for us to do anything we want with our lives. Play your hand of

cards as well as you can!

Just before I close, I

will say a huge thank-you to Dr. Marc and all the fantastic management and staff.

I am thrilled to be here with you guys, and I hope to keep in touch, and, who

knows, I might even be able to come back and let you know if those briefcases

worked in the shark water.

I want to close now

with a quote from Lawrence of Arabia, one of my great heroes. In his book The

Seven Pillars of Wisdom he says this: "All men dream dreams, but not

all men dream equally, for there are those who dream at night in the empty recesses

of their minds, and they awake in the morning to find that, behold, it was just

a dream. But there are other men and women who are dangerous dreamers."

(I love that—dangerous dreamers) "For these are men and women who

dream in the daytime with their eyes open, that they might fulfill their dreams."

So, good ladies and gentlemen, don't be a daydreamer, be a dangerous dreamer.[Applause]

(back)

(next) (contents)