Blind aviator makes a touchdown in city

He has walked to the South Pole, climbed the Himalayas, scuba-dived 20 km under the Red Sea, and circumnavigated the world using more than 80 different forms of transport — all in the past four years.

Having accomplished all that, Miles Hilton-Barber now has a new ambition — to fly a microlight aircraft more than halfway around the world from London to Sydney, Australia.

It is only when you meet the adventurer that the full depth of his achievements hits you. Miles lost total vision in both his eyes 20 years ago, and is using a revolutionary speech-output technology to fly his specially customised microlight plane on its 22,500 km journey from London to Sydney.

Mumbai is a stop-over en route, where Barber is scheduled to give motivational speeches to raise part of the $1 million he hopes to raise for his favourite charity, Seeing Is Believing.

The visually-disabled adventurer is accompanied by his co-pilot Richard Meredith-Hardy, a well known pilot who was the first person to fly a microlight from London to Cape Town 20 years ago. “I need him for legal reasons. They don’t believe that a blind pilot can fly on his own,” he says.

“London to Sydney is one of the classic air routes. We will be travelling across Europe, the Mediterranean and West Asia,” says Richard.

The Microlight team hopes to undertake up to two flights a day, completing the journey in less than 55 days. For aviation enthusiasts, the aircraft is a British-built 100 HP Flexwing Pegasus Mainair GT 450.

“The wingspan of the aircraft is less than three metres and it can fit under a wing of a 767 Boeing aircraft. Please don’t try to do it with your vehicle,” he says.