June 8, 2021 Remembering Wayne Rodgers

The Liberty Gazette

June 8, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: Many years ago, my first job out of paralegal school was with a small firm in Kingwood. I worked for the two partners, but I also had many occasions to visit with another lawyer, one who rented space in the same office. 

Wayne Rodgers had retired as a vice president of Brown & Root and was helping people with their wills, probate, and real estate needs. We officed together there for nearly four years, and in that time, I came to have a deep respect for him. Solid, truthful, caring, unselfish. But he never told me he had been a fighter pilot in Korea. That was something I learned recently from one of his daughters. 

Wayne has moved to heaven, having a sweet life, I am sure. Meanwhile, as I’m still here, I have heard about another side of Wayne. I wish I’d known these stories back in the day. But now, all I want to do is honor him by sharing them with you. Wayne’s family explained his true unwillingness to tell these stories—they had to drag them out of him. 

Lt. Wayne Rodgers and his T-6 Texan

He was in his junior year at the University of Texas when the Korean war broke out. He and several of his buddies went down and signed up in the Air Force. He started flight training in the T-6 Texan at
Lackland and then went on to Big Spring for combat skills and weapon training. 

Wayne had grown up in Munday, Texas, and his parents’ home was across the street from the old, two-story Munday High School. On cross country flights, he would head straight to Munday and dive bomb and do high-speed flyovers over the high school. He knew his parents were at work, so they would be none the wiser. He just wanted to show off. That big radial engine was so loud, he emptied the entire school to watch his air show. This happened two or three times until the principal talked to his parents to ask him to please stop. It was said later that his flying escapades proved to be a tremendous recruiting tool in the years that followed. 

After Combat Skills Training, he transitioned into the F86 aircraft at Nellis AFB to get his go-to-war training. Texas was playing Tennessee in the 1951 Cotton Bowl, and at halftime, he could not stand the thought of starting that training without his Becky. He got up, told his buddies, “I'll see you for class at Nellis in a few days,” and headed to Mississippi to get married. Swank, young pilot that he was, he surprised, married and hauled off his Becky to Nevada. In private, he would smile and shake his head at the sheer gall he possessed in those youthful, desperate days. 

At Nellis, Wayne’s squadron leader was decorated ace, Iven Carl Kincheloe Jr., who he said had a mission to make his squad of three novice pilots quit. Just wait till you find out what Wayne learned to do! Next week… 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com 

June 1, 2021 Warp Speed

The Liberty Gazette

June 1, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: The first time I heard of warp speed was as a kid when it was introduced into our lives via the TV series Star Trek. What it meant in the series was a speed that was faster than the speed of light, that it may take only minutes to reach a star 30 or 50 light years away. But this flew in the face of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which says, in part, that as mass approaches the speed of light, it expands to infinity. 

So why didn’t the starship Enterprise blow up? The answer is that the Enterprise was operating in a protective bubble at sub-light speed. The ship’s warp drives, acting like the afterburners for supersonic jets but for starships, convert energy, both matter and anti-matter, to bend both space and time—warping it. The space in front of the bubble contracts and the space behind it expands, creating a wave of energy. This wave moving faster than light, pushes the ship along as if it were a surfer. 

This is all great science fiction, and with enough unknowns in physics, there is a vague plausibility to the idea. Einstein didn’t say space couldn’t be expanded or contracted. One thing is certain, the Star Trek TV program brought physics into the average American home, even if it wasn’t exact science. 

The imagination of Gene Rodenberry, the show’s creator, spawned things we take for granted today, like the communicators and tricorders we call cell phones today. It also got people interested in space, and it garnered support for the United States manned space program. 

Interestingly, the original series was canceled after just three years. When Neil Armstrong was making his small step for man, the lights were going out on the Star Trek set. But not for long. Trekkie conventions still have sellout crowds, and each generation brings another set of fans. 

Rodenberry was an Army Air Corps pilot in WWII and flew 89 missions in B-17s operating out of Hawaii. After the war, he became a commercial pilot for Pan Am World Airways. He left that career to pursue writing and become a police officer. In his spare time, he wrote scripts for the TV shows Highway Patrol and Have Gun Will Travel. Then came his breakthrough with Star Trek, where he not only introduced physics in general, but he incorporated many aviation terms and practices as well. When Rodenberry passed away in 1991, his ashes were among the first human remains to be taken into space. 

Can something travel faster than the speed of light? Recently, scientists measured a couple jets of energy inside the black hole identified as M87. X-ray data appears to show particles in the jets traveling faster than the speed of light due to a phenomenon known as superluminal motion. One such cluster, or knot, was measured at 6.7 times the speed of light. Like Gene Rodenberry’s imagination that has inspired countless other imaginations—those particles appear to be traveling at warp speed.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com 

May 25, 2021 The Most Interesting Conversations

The Liberty Gazette

May 25, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: If you haven’t tried the Clubhouse app yet, check it out. It’s finally available for Android users, too. I joined awhile back and am thoroughly enjoying live audio conversations with NASA engineers, authors and publishers, historians, and fellow pilots. There’s something for everyone in the Clubhouse. Hands down, my favorite club is “Small Steps and Giant Leaps,” which they call, “Your home for talks on human exploration of outer space.” Fans and members of the aerospace community tune in for astronaut interviews, discussions about other planets, and debates between CEOs and scientists on everything from astrobiology to asteroid mining. The club’s founder, Alder Riley, is keen on discussing the technology and social implications of spreading humanity to the stars. When he’s not hosting these thought-provoking chats, he’s building factories the size of vending machines that can 3D print, computer-machine (CNC), and laser cut. His plan is to place these factories in every town on the planet, and eventually ship them to the Moon and Mars “so creativity isn’t bound to Earth.”

Meanwhile, Alder opens these fascinating rooms in his club on Clubhouse, from three to five a day, all published on his schedule in the app. Anyone can listen in, and even chat with astronauts and engineers who are right now working on the Mars projects. 

Recently, in the “Space for All Nations” club, I received some enlightening knowledge from Axel Tricaud, a disabled space engineer who spoke on adapted spaceflight for para-astronauts. He’s a pilot and a deep-sea diver as well, encouraging others with disabilities.

Past, present, and future are all represented on Clubhouse. Another of my favorite clubs is “The Tudor History Club.” Wednesday last week marked 485 years since the execution of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII. The team of hosts is made up of British historians, and for this special occasion, they met at the Tower of London to produce an hour-long live audio tour. By the way, this is all free. 

I don’t think I was the only one in the audience who felt moved by the respectful way in which the tour was spoken. The four tour guides placed themselves at various locations in and around the tower. They described the scene from where they each stood, and then shared the history of the day in detailed moments – what they saw, and what Queen Anne would have seen as she walked to the scaffold. They painted the picture of the historic, heart-wrenching time so well, it was almost like being there in 1536, remarkably reproducing the sadness of her execution. 

The Tower of London has a brutal past and should be experienced with reverence. So I don’t mean it lightly when I mention how close both Heathrow and London City Airport are to the tower. What a great job these ladies did creating the atmosphere. The essence of the story was present, despite jets flying low overhead and a helicopter from nearby London Heliport. 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

May 18, 2021 Critters Lodge

The Liberty Gazette

May 18, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: It was time for our semi-annual short trek north to Centerville, to our favorite fly-in. Having been weather-delayed by a week, it became a beautiful Mother’s Day event shared with moms, dads, kids, and grandparents from all around these parts, everyone enjoying a perfect family weekend camping with airplanes. Experimental and factory-built aircraft, Cessna, Piper, Grumman, Van’s RV, Beechcraft, and others descended on Beverly and Wendall Dillard’s airplane ranch called Critters Lodge.

Okay, so the weather wasn’t perfect, but it was flyable, if you don’t mind a few potholes in the sky. Ceilings were about 1,500 feet, meaning there was that much room between the ground and the base of the clouds. No nosebleed flying for us that day! But it was also rather gusty. Winds at some airports were reported at 11 knots, gusting to 24 or so. That’s not a problem if you’re landing and taking off straight into it. But if you have a 90-degree crosswind trying to blow you away from the runway, there is that “maximum demonstrated crosswind capability” of the airplane of which one must be mindful. There’s a saying about that. It has to do with becoming a test pilot. 

A number is derived from whatever the wind is doing the day the airplane is flown for FAA certification. That number signifies the airplane’s maximum demonstrated capability to handle crosswinds. Pilots who test that edge are venturing into undocumented territory. If you want to land the airplane in more crosswind than demonstrated at certification, you become, in essence, a test pilot. 

So, there we stood at the hangar, discussing the plan on the ground, which is the right place to talk, as opposed to after you’ve taken off. We considered that the grass runway at Critters Lodge is enveloped by a forest of tall trees and there are campers and airplanes parked along the sides of the runway. The runway is oriented northeast-southwest. While there is no weather measurement system there, we could estimate it would be similar to what was blowing around our region at that time. The wind was coming from the southeast, which would be about a 70-degree crosswind, possibly gusting to 24 knots. We agreed to go, but we would carry extra speed on final and be ready to go around if we hit a gust at treetop level, which is where the wind’s flow would be disrupted. Our 80-knot final got us there with no problems, and we were guided to our parking spot. 

Unfortunately, Beverly and her amazing cooking team had to throw out some of the food from the weekend before. Potatoes and “fluffy” desserts that wouldn’t keep in a freezer couldn’t be saved. But the brisket was ready for hundreds of hungry pilots and friends, and it was just like old times. Speaking of which, we met some new folks, including a retired businessman from Scotland and a former Hollywood stuntman who now teaches people to fly at the Tyler County Airport near Woodville. 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

May 11, 2021 Ingenuity

The Liberty Gazette

May 11, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: Have you been following the reports from Mars? It’s almost like living in 1903 with exciting reports of “first flight”. The only difference is, now it is our (NASA’s) mission to prove flight is possible on another planet. 

Seven months after leaving Earth, Ingenuity, NASA’s four-pound helicopter drone strapped onto the Perseverance rover, landed on Mars. And what’s the big deal about a drone hovering around Mars? Plenty. This ain’t your kid’s playground drone. These drones are changing how scientists explore planets. Cutting loose from the ground-bound land rovers will enable scientists to study locations that rovers cannot reach, like over cliffs and hills and fields of large rocks that would stop a rover. 

From its first hover and rotation, proving not just flight, but controlled flight, to its fourth flight at the end of April, when Ingenuity traveled 872 feet horizontally and 16 feet vertically, for two minutes, we now know extraterrestrial flight is possible. Beyond Mars, NASA plans to launch Dragonfly, another drone helicopter with an amazing mission – a trip to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in 2026 or 2027. With each new accomplishment comes learning, and the knowledge gained from Mars will help the engineers who are building Dragonfly.

The Earth’s atmosphere is considerably different from that around Mars, and from Titan’s. Mars’ atmosphere is just one percent that of Earth’s. But Titan’s atmosphere is about 60% thicker than ours. Consider that in order to fly, an aircraft (whether it’s a drone or a Boeing 787) needs to generate lift. This is accomplished mechanically either by propellers or jet propulsion or some combination. Air moves around an airplane’s wings, or around a helicopter’s rotors, to produce this lift. The amount of lift you get depends on the density of the air and how fast it moves over the wings or rotors. Denser air creates more lift at a given airspeed than less dense air, so in a less dense atmosphere, like Mars, more effort is required to create lift. Therefore, Ingenuity’s rotor blades are very long compared to its mass and spin much faster than they would have to on Earth. 

Right now, Ingenuity is helping to find the best locations for Perseverance to drive around on Mars and find soil samples. They’re looking for signs of fossil life in a dried-up river delta. 

Meanwhile, on Earth, the FAA is updating aviation navigation charts, adding more little magenta rocket icons to the growing number of space launch areas as more private businesses enter the industry to exit the atmosphere. 

While subscribing to NASA’s news can keep you up to date, my favorite avenue for insight is the app Clubhouse, where I can hear the very engineers who built Ingenuity and are building Dragonfly, and who are actively working the Mars project. I tap to listen live as they talk enthusiastically about exploring Mars, the challenges involved in bringing back samples, and their ideas about Titan. It’s like sitting in the lunchroom at NASA and getting in on all the good stuff.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

May 4, 2021 Notorious Airports

The Liberty Gazette

May 4, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: I read the headline, The Ten Most Dangerous Airports in the World, and I roll my eyes. There are challenging airports, no doubt, but what in that writer’s opinion makes an airport THE MOST DANGEROUS? 

I love writing descriptive prose about what pilots see, what factors contribute to their judgement, and how they handle unusual situations. A Hawker student once said to me, “You really like to make people think outside the box,” and it’s true. The aviation life is filled with if this—then what? My job is preparing pilots to handle stressful situations. All professional pilots go through regular training to cover as many different contingencies as possible, so there should be no dangerous airports. 

Actually, the most dangerous airport could be the airport they know the best, the one with which they are the most comfortable. Complacency is one of the biggest problems facing pilots. The system, training, and the standard operating procedures pilots follow are in place to combat this. But letting down one’s guard even a little can lead down a path where more mistakes can contribute to a tragic situation. Comparatively, when landing at a so-called dangerous airport, pilots are on high alert, paying closer attention, resulting in fewer mistakes. 

During the summer flying season in Antarctica for instance, large jets and turboprops land on runways plowed out of the snow. In some instances, the airplanes land on glaciers that may or may not have monstrous crevasses a thousand feet deep underlying a blanket of snow. There are procedures for the pilots of these aircraft to mitigate most of those dangers. They are always ready for the possibility of going around and not landing. They don’t commit themselves to fate.

I’ve flown into my share of interesting places, like La Carlota Airport, a/k/a General Francisco de Miranda Air Base, right smack in the middle of Caracas, Venezuela’s east side. Because it sits in a black hole in a mountain valley with tall buildings on all sides, it was only open during daylight. Landing there required a well-thought-out plan in case we needed to abort and go around. The same was true of takeoffs. My favorite image wasn’t the awe-inspiring view out the window. It was glancing at my co-pilot’s eyes getting wider as we descended below the balconies and terraces of those buildings and hillsides on their first flight there. 

Similarly, the approach into Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport had airliners pointing the nose at a checkerboard painted on the side of a mountain. Just before reaching it, they turned sharply to line up with the runways, nearly scraping the tops of buildings as they landed in extreme crosswinds. The operations produced a highly technical workload, but for all the difficulties, the few incidents that happened were primarily caused by mechanical problems. Eventually, a new airport was built further from the city, and Kai Tak was closed. 

I don’t regard any airport specifically as dangerous, and all airports deserve the pilot’s full focus. 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

April 27, 2021 Jetymology

The Liberty Gazette

April 27, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: Want to know where jets come from? Other than the factories. Would it surprise you to know that the word, “jet” seems to have its origins centuries before the jet age? What got me going on this was reading a 200-year-old novel that had nothing to do with airplanes, yet the word “jet” was used a few times, in its verb and adjective forms. So, I had to know. And then, of course, I had to share it with you.

Around the late 15th century, the words “jectere” and “jactare” came into use. These are Late Latin words, meaning “to throw” or “thrust.” In fact, “jectere” was abstracted from “dejectare,” “projectare,” and other similar words. “Jactare,” to toss about, to throw or cast, comes from the root *ye- meaning to throw, impel; to push forth or fling violently. At least, that’s according to Wiktionary and etymonline.com. 

The French must have been jealous, thinking about how they would try so hard to beat future Americans into the air, and so they came up with a word, “jeter,” also meaning “to throw.” About a hundred years later, this evolved into “jet,” meaning to jut out. 

Those were the verb forms, but they also used it as a noun, meaning a spout from which water (or other liquid) comes. This is where we get jet propulsion; jet engines were named as such because they use jet propulsion.

The word can also be used as an adjective. “Jet black” is a deep black and comes from lignite, a mineral used for ornamentation. That was news to me. The Anglo-French adjective was geet, while the Old French version was jaiet. The Latin is gagates, and the Greeks offered gagates lithos, which represented the location of this mineral. Credit for that knowledge goes to wyzant.com. 

And then we have words that grew out of the meanings for “jet” such as jettison (to throw out) and jetlag, a sleeping problem when one’s circadian rhythm is messed up, usually due to long trips across several time zones. The way things are going, jetlag may soon become an antiquated word. With tight controls on international travel, tomorrow’s generation may never know how jetlag feels.

Mike: Cheers to today’s etymology lesson. Basic jet engine operation is simple: it ingests air—pulls it in, squeezes it, and then fuel is mixed into the compressed air. Once the fuel-air mixture is set aflame, it expands rapidly and is pushed through the tail pipe (also known as a jet pipe) with much greater force than when it entered. That force is measured in pounds of thrust. Then, as Newton’s Third Law of Motion says, where there is an action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and away we go. 

There are different types of jet engines, such turbojets, which are often referred to as straight jets, and fan jets, where the jet engine core turns a huge fan like those on most airliners. But they all help you get out of town. 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

April 20, 2021 Don't Mess With Texas

The Liberty Gazette

April 20, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: Every day when we take our elderly German Shepherd, Hilda, out for her walk, we encounter trash along the sides of the neighborhood roads. It’s abominable, and it makes us wonder what kind of people these are who toss their trash out in front of someone else’s house. We pick up what we can, drop it in the poop bags, and add it to our trash bin, all the while muttering things about these characters who we think even live in this neighborhood. Have they no pride in their community?

One day, Mike was so angry with the amount of trash he collected on just two streets that he wished he could take the Commemorative Air Force’s B-17G Flying Fortress and scare the bejeebers out of those skunks who are littering here daily. “Just like that video,” he said. “I want to do that to them.” 

“What video?” I asked. 

“The B-17 that hunted down a screwball just like these. It was a commercial for the Texas Highway Department’s ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ campaign.” 

“Oh, cool,” I responded and rushed over to my comfy writing chair in the living room and looked it up on YouTube. 

You might remember it. A couple of yahoos in an old red pickup rumble down a dusty West Texas highway, country music playing, and the driver tosses trash out his window. 

Queue the announcer (in West Texas drawl): “Somethin’ to think about. If you throw trash on Texas highways…” (sudden change in music to a daunting, imminent “I will get you” bass note) “Somebody up there’s gon-be watchin’.” 

A heatwave-rippled silhouette rises ominously from over the horizon and, just feet above the ground, it zeros in on the truck.

Radio: “Ghost Squadron to Ghost Squadron Leader, we’ve got one in sight. Let’s make an impression on this guy. Over.”

Announcer: “And you don’t wanna mess with the Texas Confederate Air Force.” Whoosh as the B-17 passes so low you must duck. “So don’t mess with Texas.” 

Radio: “Bombs away.” 

Yes, how wonderful that would be to invite the CAF to Liberty to hunt them down. 

The CAF brought out their North American P-51 Mustang and Grumman F4F Wildcat along with the B-17, and the director tried filming the ad with all three aircraft, but the Flying Fortress produces so much wake turbulence that the other two couldn’t stay close enough behind it, and above the wake, they were too high for the dramatic effect.

Mike: Shot more than 20 years ago, people remember this commercial among all the other “Don’t Mess With Texas” spots, including those with Texas’ famous residents Chuck Norris and George Strait. 

I wonder if the perpetrator’s perspective would change if all the trash they dumped on our streets over say 10 years was collected and then planted on their own front lawn by a low flying four-engine WWII bomber. Would the B-17’s bomb bay be big enough to hold it all? Let’s find out. 

Bombs away.

 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

April 13, 2021 A Little Local Flying

The Liberty Gazette

April 13, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: Wheels up on a sunny Friday afternoon, and we’re over the hometown here spotting reality from a different perspective. I had wondered about those cranes along the river. For the past couple of weeks, I have noticed when driving past them at dark that all but the shortest one seem to be unlit. That’s rather unusual. The standard (law) is that anything over 199 feet must have a light on top. If the light goes out, a Notice To Airmen must be issued through the formal channels for the FAA to publish. The goal is to prevent pilots from hitting stuff. Smart goal, thank you very much. I’m not sure why only the shortest one has a light, so beware, if you’re flying low. 

After the birds’ eye view of the construction project, we flew on toward Conroe’s Lone Star Executive Airport to practice some instrument approaches. When the weather is beautiful, as it was that day, the skies tend to be more densely populated with small aircraft. I wondered why the Houston approach controller sighed after I asked for a practice approach. As we got close to Conroe and were switched over to the tower controller, we realized what that sigh meant. Lone Star Executive was abuzz with small airplanes, and the guy in the tower was spewing instructions rapid-fire! 

The wind favored landing on runway 14, so everyone was being funneled in, or out, that way. Some were flying multiple circuits in the traffic pattern, practicing landings, some were practicing approaches, like us. Others were arriving to dine at the Black Walnut, and some were taking off to who-knows-where. It was the start of the weekend, and people were getting out of Dodge. 

As the controller cleared us to land on 14, he said immediately after, “Exit One-Nine.” That’s a runway, not a taxiway. Okay, fine, runway 19 was not in use as a runway at that time, so it was being used like a taxiway. But being given this unexpected instruction while we are on short final meant we had to look quickly at how much landing distance we had before we would arrive at 19, the crossing runway, where we were expected to clear the way for the plane behind us. It meant we should plan on landing early, touch down close to the approach end of the runway and be ready to apply brakes sooner. For someone with a lot of experience, that’s a few quick adjustments. But for students and other low-time pilots, the fast-talking controller issuing orders, some of them unusual, this scenario can be intimidating. 

What probably got pilots’ attention more than anything that afternoon was his no-nonsense, gruff voice – “Listen up people! You have to be ready when I call you!” He left no question who was in charge, which is good. Later, we asked a friend who keeps their airplane there about him. “Ha! Yes, we know him. Yes, he’s very good at his job!” she said. 

How was your Friday afternoon?

 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

April 6, 2021 If Only...

The Liberty Gazette

April 6, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Last week when we wrote about flying blind, we knew we would want to return to the British blind adventurer we mentioned, Miles Hilton-Barber. Miles lost his eyesight while in his early twenties. But he’s flown an aircraft halfway around the world from London to Australia, and that’s not all. Wait, let’s step back a bit. 

At age 18, Miles expected to follow his father, a WWII fighter pilot, into the Royal Rhodesian Air Force, but he failed the eyesight exam. Three years later, both he and his brother, Geoff, were diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa, a genetic disease that leads to total blindness. Game over? Yes, for Miles. He adopted an attitude of victimhood that lasted for the next 30 years. Then he helped Geoff build a boat, and Geoff went off and set a world record as the first blind person to cross an ocean solo. He sailed from Africa to Australia by himself. Afterward, he told Miles to stop focusing on his blindness, and start focusing on his dreams.

That was the kick in the pants Miles needed. Here he’d been waiting all those years for a miraculous healing. If only he could see again, then he could… but there was Geoff. He wasn’t waiting. He was living, while Miles had been telling himself, “you’re not meant to do that.”

He realized that we cannot always control things that happen to us, but we can control how we respond. He didn’t know how it would happen, but he would pursue his lifelong dream to be a pilot. It took years of perseverance, but he never gave up, and one day he took off from London and touched down in Sydney after 55 days and 13,000 miles in a microlight aircraft. Speech output technology and a co-pilot helped him do it, and most important to Miles, he raised money to eradicate preventable blindness in developing countries. 

Miles has set other world records and taken part in extreme events across all seven continents in mountaineering, desert and polar ultra-marathons, power-boat racing, scuba-diving, motor-racing, aerobatic and supersonic flying. He completed the Marathon Des Sables, 151 miles across the Saharan desert in the “toughest footrace on Earth.” He’s climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and holds the world record as the first blind person to man-haul a sled nearly 250 miles across Antarctica. 

But here’s the thing: If you’re Miles Hilton-Barber, you believe that God can use you to help others; that it’s not about you, it’s about relationships. He and his wife of several decades have children and grandchildren who are the light of their lives. 

He also says don’t let your achievements make you arrogant and proud. Rather, know that by God’s grace, if you can do these things, it must mean that other people can. “It’s like walking through deep snow,” he says, “you need a strong person up front, breaking through and making a path for others to follow.” That’s what his flight to Sydney did for preventable blindness.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com