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.
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