Walls of rain swept over foam-flecked waves. He was 200 miles from Greenland with 200 miles to go to the safety of Iceland. Brian Milton was flying a contraption that looked like a yellow motor scooter suspended from a hang glider. He was buffeted by the winds and his ground speed had dropped to twenty miles per hour. His microlight didn’t look as if it was meant to fly. It was travelling more slowly than the clapped-out second-hand Vespa I owned in the late 1960s, and yet he was in the middle of the longest ocean leg of his attempt to circumnavigate the world. It was 15 July 1999 and he was on the home leg of a journey in a vehicle, halfway between an early flying machine and a hang-glider, a journey which only a man of his dogged tenacity would have completed.
Brian Milton, stocky with a broad face that has the quality of a slightly angry bulldog, is neither a rich entrepreneur like Richard Branson, nor a charismatic public figure, but he has always had an adventurous streak. He drifted into BBC radio as a freelance journalist when he was thirty, found he loved the work and eventually became editor of BBC Radio London’s breakfast programme. He also got married, had two children, bought a big comfortable house near St Albans and seemed to be settling into a steady BBC career.
He stumbled across hang-gliding, which was still in its infancy, in 1974 when he interviewed a man called Brian Wood who had just managed to stay in the air for eight and a half hours – a record at that time. Milton was intrigued and offered to make a thirty-minute programme about hang-gliding on condition that Wood taught him to fly.
In those days there were no formal qualifications or procedures. You were simply told what to do and launched by yourself from the top of a hill. Brian Milton’s first flight was off the Devil’s Dyke in Sussex, and from that moment he was hooked. After buying his first hang-glider, he soon started taking part in competitions which in those early days were slalom events with a course of just over a mile round markers placed on the ground. He came second in one of the national competitions and it wasn’t long before he became involved in hang-gliding politics, creating the British Hang Gliding League, and taking charge of the training of the British team. His influence took the team to the top of international hang-gliding, but not without conflict. Indeed Brian Milton’s path is strewn with controversy, the product of a single-minded drive and a short fuse. He also became interested in the development of microlights (the concept of putting an engine on a hang glider to give it powered flight), test flying some of the early machines.
In 1978 he very nearly lost his life on one of these early test flights, crashing from 250 feet after his craft went into an uncontrollable dive, which left him with an understandable fear of heights but at the same time quite failed to deter him from planning the first ever microlight flight to Australia. In this enterprise he was forestalled by Eve Jackson who had set out without any publicity and the minimum of cash, in the smallest microlight on the market, to attempt the journey at her leisure, taking fifteen months to complete the flight.
Brian Milton adjusted his Australian sights to the concept of trying to beat the race record made in 1919 by the Australian Ross Smith who flew from London to Australia in a Vickers Vimy bomber with a crew of three in 172 hours of actual flying time. Milton’s objective was twofold – to beat Ross Smith’s record from London to Sydney and to reach Sydney in time for the 250th anniversary of the Australian Commonwealth.
He was partially successful, taking fifty-nine days, compared with Ross Smith’s ninety-six days, but unfortunately arrived three days after the celebrations. It was, however, still a considerable achievement in which all his resolution had been needed. He had crashed when landing on a Greek island, nearly writing off his machine, and had then ditched in the Persian Gulf on Christmas Day while the Iranians were attacking two tankers a few miles to the north. He still had to struggle with the fear of heights, born from his first crash. It was at its worst over India, flying in haze over the dusty plains with nothing to distract him. He was conscious of a djinn standing on the nose of the craft, telling him to jump. It was terrifyingly real. The djinn vanished if he had things with which to occupy his mind, so as a last resort he would imagine making love to any girl he could summon up in his thoughts.
The idea of setting himself another and more ambitious target to race against now obsessed Milton who admits it was fuelled by anger at the lack of notice his Australian flight had received in microlighting circles. This time he would microlight around the world in eighty days, the challenge set in Jules Verne’s classic. He began looking for a sponsor to bring his dream to life.
He wrote innumerable letters but was turned down every time, though Richard Branson, heavily involved in his own ballooning venture, at least took the trouble to reply personally. Eventually Brian netted a sponsor, the Liechtenstein Global Trust, a little-known but lucrative fund management company. They were prepared to put up the £300,000 he reckoned he needed in return for the microlight being called GT Global.
A friend, Keith Reynolds, a first-class mechanic and experienced hang-glider and microlight instructor with whom Brian had often flown, was passionately interested in the project and suggested Milton should use a two-seater weight shift trike with a larger engine than he had used on the Australian flight. Brian had already decided he wanted a companion on a flight of this magnitude and invited Keith to join him as mechanic and alternative pilot. But their relationship was not one of equal footing. Keith Reynolds was put on the payroll, being guaranteed twenty-five weeks work at £800 a week.
The new machine looked like a tricycle motor scooter slung under a hang glider wing. The pilot and pillion passenger sat on scooter seats with no protection from the elements, with the powerful eighty horsepower engine mounted behind the pillion, its propeller facing backwards. The pilot steered with a control bar linked to the wing pivoted above the trike. Pulling it back tilted the wing down to make it go taster, while pushing it away, raised the wing, causing the craft to climb and therefore go more slowly. Swinging the bar to right or left changed direction. There was also a rudder bar for the feet but this was only used while taxiing to change the direction of the front wheel. The only other control was the throttle, which could be manipulated by hand as well as by foot. Brian found it an aesthetically pleasing machine to fly, for it relied so directly on the pilot’s weight and muscle. He described it as a cross between riding a cross-country motorbike and a wild horse. Because there were none of the confines of a cockpit, visibility on all sides was superb and there was an accentuated feeling of speed and flight as the air rushed past. In turbulent air it became a real battle with the elements, calling for a gorilla grip on the control bar.
The average cruising speed was around fifty-six miles per hour though Brian got up to 102 with a following wind when flying through the Rockies. His ceiling was limited to how high he could fly without supplementary oxygen. The highest he reached was when he flew at 12,000 feet over the Greenland Ice Cap. Carrying about twenty-six gallons of fuel he could manage a maximum of 500 miles in normal conditions without refuelling. With the rush of air and the noise of the engine it was impossible for pilot and pillion rider to hear each other, so communication was by radio fitted inside their helmets, and on the frequent occasions that the radios failed, they had to resort to signals. It was all very basic but robust. The craft could take quite a hammering in the air and even land in a cross wind of thirty-five miles per hour. It was also relatively easy to service and fix when inevitably things went wrong.
Conflict becomes a recurring theme in the story of Brian Milton’s venture. His twenty-four-year-old marriage had ended three years earlier; that of Keith Reynolds ended shortly after Brian invited him to join the project. At least they were now both in the same boat, or in this case, trike. Milton soon fell out with his PR manager, Simon Newlyn. At one stage in December 1997, only a few weeks before the announcement of their sponsorship, GT Global threatened to pull out of the arrangement. Richard Branson reappeared on the scene with first a proposal of sponsorship, then a challenge to make a race of it and finally a suggestion that, if Milton delayed his flight until May, Branson would put up a prize of $1,000,000 for the first to make it round the world. Milton was not prepared to delay his flight, which he wanted to start in March to ensure that he could cross Bangladesh before the arrival of the monsoon, but the threat of the race was to remain with him throughout the flight. His chosen route was a circuitous one following Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg. This meant that, had Branson’s sponsored team started racing, taking the shortest possible route and using all Virgin’s contacts with civil aviation authorities, Brian would face a serious threat.
Relations with Newlyn could not have been worse. He threatened to resign on three different occasions and actually did so once but somehow remained the project’s media consultant, mainly because the sponsor found it easier dealing with him than directly with Milton.
At last on 24 March 1998 Brian and Keith were ready to fly from Brooklands, the historic motor racetrack, now an aircraft museum. They had the band of the RAF Regiment to play them off and an escort of thirty microlights to accompany them over the Channel. That day they covered 400 miles, reaching St Dié, just short of the Maritime Alps. This was all quite civilised flying, but their first crisis came on the fourth day, when they were flying over the Adriatic towards Corfu. All their communications died, both between each other and with the outside world.
They had agreed that they would take turns to pilot the craft on alternate days and that day it was Keith’s turn. He elected to keep going, managing to reach a Jordanian airliner on the emergency radio frequency so that they could warn Corfu airport that they didn’t have proper air-to-ground communication. So far, the flight had gone well. Even better, Brian found that he had lost the fear that had plagued him on his flight to Australia. He seemed to be getting over his phobia. It was just as well, for they were now heading for trouble. Greece had recently been hit by the worst storm in living memory and was still suffering the aftermath. They were buffeted by fierce winds in the mountain valleys leading to Athens but kept going and then pushed on to Rhodes. Brian was enjoying himself, commenting: ‘I remember thinking half a dozen times that day how happy I was to be there. There was nowhere else in the world, even when fighting the horror conditions in the “Valley of Death” near Thisye, that I would rather have been. It was as life should be, on the edge and going somewhere. My usually restless mind was at ease with itself.’
In many ways it was a strange kind of adventure, similar to the experiences of wartime aircrew. The risk and danger and wild open spaces of sky and cloud are all there during flight, and in the case of their microlight with its puny engine and its trike, open to the elements, the sense of vulnerability must have been even greater. Yet they were flying from airport to airport, in itself quite frightening as they came in behind the giant airliners with the risk of turbulence. But then, once on the ground, they were back into urbanised living, with hassles over Customs and flight plans, of where to shelter GT Global, and finally getting a taxi to the nearest motel, where in most cases they could get a bath, steak and chips and a cool beer. In this respect it was very different from the life of the mountaineer or long-distance sailor or even the balloonist who divorces himself from the comforts of the land for the duration of his flight.
Nevertheless the adventures in the air could be all too frightening and varied. They had crossed the Mediterranean from Cyprus, taking off from the British air base at Akrotiri behind an American U2 spy plane. They approached the coast of Lebanon and then, as directed by air traffic control, flew into Syria with some apprehension, since a friendly reception was not always guaranteed. They had to fly round Israel to reach Jordan, where Brian had been well entertained by King Hussein on his Australian flight. Once there they would be among friends.
As they flew low over the Syrian desert they were suddenly aware of a MiG-21 banking across their course. GT Global was fifteen miles from the Jordanian border. They had no wireless contact with the fighter plane. It was a huge dark menacing shape, twisting and banking to either side of their craft and buffeting them in its slipstream. They just kept going, creeping all too slowly towards the safety of the frontier. What did it want, would it fire, had it been authorised to bring them down? It came past them even more slowly and dropped its undercarriage, the universal signal to land. But they could not as the terrain below was too rough. They were now only five miles from the frontier. They kept going and the plane just turned away and left them. Had it had any authorisation, or was it just playing its own bullying game with the puny yellow microlight? They had just enough fuel to reach Amman, where they had a warm welcome and were driven to the Hotel Intercontinental as guests of King Hussein.
They were doing well. It was only day nine and they were flying over Saudi Arabia. Brian had hoped to follow the pipeline but was told that there were too many secret installations along its route and therefore he would have to cross the empty desert further to the south. The desert turned out not to be too empty and they were able to follow a long straight road, giving soporific and monotonous flying until the engine began to overheat. One of the advantages of a microlight is that you can land it easily on a road. They waited for a good gap in the traffic and put it down. They couldn’t see anything wrong with the engine, but the overflow bottle was full of dark rather oily water, definitely a bad sign. They topped it up with their own spare water supply and begged some from passing motorists, before pulling out into a gap in the traffic and taking off, only to overheat again.
This time they were less lucky. They landed by a large puddle of water, but almost immediately a car carrying an army lance corporal stopped. He asked to see their passports, confiscated them and told them they would have to come with him. Brian eventually persuaded him to allow them to fly to the nearby airfield, with him, still in possession of their passports, following in his car.
It was dusk and, by the time they were in the air, it was pitch dark. The engine was overheating again and so they made a landing on the darkened road, which was much more difficult than during the day. They topped the engine up with more water and took off once again. This time they just made it to Qaysumah airfield. Keith spent the next day trying to isolate the problem in close discussion on the phone with the engine manufacturers back in England. He couldn’t find a fault and yet whenever he made a test flight the engine overheated. Eventually Keith said, ‘We’re going to need a new engine’.
Back in England the manufacturer worked through the night to modify the engine for GT Global and put it on a plane to Riyadh next morning. It stuck briefly in Customs but by the following day it was delivered to Qaysumah. Keith fitted it and they were ready to fly with only three days lost. They took off into the hot blue desert sky and the engine temperature soared with exactly the same symptoms as before. Once again they landed on the road, this time near what looked like some kind of garage, and once again, tempers ragged, they grappled with the problem. The coolant was nearly empty. It couldn’t be the engine, so it must be the way it was mounted in the trike. They tried to clear anything that could possibly interfere with the flow of air through the radiator, removed the panniers and strapped the contents to different parts of their strange machine, all done in a temperature of 40 °C. They took off once again and this time the engine temperature remained constant. They had solved what had turned out to be a simple problem at a huge cost of a replacement engine and a great deal of mounting stress between them.
At Dharan, Keith was able to make a more long-term modification to the aircraft, tying the radiator to one of the wheel struts. Their machine was looking more and more like an Emmet cartoon construction but the overheating problem had been solved. If anything, their engine was now operating below its most efficient temperature. They flew on into the Gulf of Oman to reach Muscat. Their goal of ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ was still very attainable. The flight over Pakistan and India went smoothly but they were getting into more challenging regions. The mountains of Laos and Vietnam brought greater turbulence and the threat of thunderstorms. It was also becoming more difficult on a bureaucratic level with visas, flight plans and permissions. Grey clouds, forested mountainsides and implacable officials all crowded in. They lost a day at Luang Prabang because of torrential rain and visa problems. On the morning of 18 April, on day twenty-six, it was still cloudy but Brian thought they should give it a try. Keith disagreed. The discussion became heated, Keith accusing Brian of shouting, screaming and bulldozing him into flying.
The weather improved slightly through the morning and Keith, who had at first sat with his face in his hands, began checking the GPS and his maps. Then, without a word, he picked up his flying suit and started preparing GT Global for flight. They set out with hardly a word being spoken between them. There were still clouds around but they could pick their way between the layers, flying over the forested mountainous jungle in which the Viet Cong and young American GIs had fought. Gradually Keith relaxed and they began talking again, excited and pleased to have crossed Vietnam and to be descending into Hanoi. They were given a hero’s welcome and were told they were the first microlight to reach the capital of Vietnam.
Their elation was short lived. Though they had not been turned down, they still did not have permission to cross China. The authorities continued to prevaricate, despite the valiant efforts of the British Embassy in Beijing, and the days slipped by. Ensconced in their Hanoi hotel bedrooms, Brian and Keith occasionally communicated by phone and met for a beer each night. The British Embassy had made them warmly welcome. At the end of one embassy party they were taken on to a nightclub called Apocalypse Now, replete with the nose of an American Huey helicopter and Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ blaring out from the speakers. The fifth morning saw success at last. Prince Michael of Kent was visiting China and his intercession with the Chinese vice-premier had gained their permission. They could fly that day and would be the first microlight ever to cross China.
It was misty and they had a range of 7,000-foot mountains between them and Nanning in China but they set out nonetheless. They were now eight days behind schedule. They glimpsed steep forest-clad slopes and narrow serpentine valleys through breaks in the cloud. A forced landing could easily have been fatal. It was nearly dusk when they reached Nanning and were guided down in excellent English by the local air traffic controller. Some of the airport staff, who had been following their flight on the internet, found them a commodious garage in which to put the craft and carried them off to a good hotel and quantities of beer.
Next morning it was stormy, but they set off flying over exquisitely patterned farmland towards a cloud-girt range of mountains. Keith was in the pilot’s seat and decided to reach 7,000 feet to find a gap in the cloud layers but these soon closed down. They could not see the mountains below, were flving on their instruments and dependent on their hand-held GPS for direction, which Brian called out in as calm a voice as he could possibly manage. That day they flew 342 miles, most of it in cloud, only coming out of it just short of Macau to fly over the flat coastal plain to make their landing.
A short easy flight to Hong Kong and they were back to frightening, stressful flying up the coast of China in heavy cloud. There was no question of sitting out the weather in the comfort of a Hong Kong four-star hotel; they had too much time to catch up. Once again they were dependent on their instruments. Brian wrote: ‘Blind panic in such situations is dangerous. You are aware that you could spiral out of the sky, so you fall back on technique and suppress your fears. There is only the faintest inkling of how awesomely fearful it is and that provides gallons of adrenaline. We were undersupplied with blind flying instruments, but the turn and bank indicator paid for itself a hundred times over in those minutes of blind descent.’
Eventually they managed to get below the cloud over the sea and they could see the coastline through marching curtains of rain. They were soon soaked and worried about how well their instruments would stand up to the wet. They had been heading for Fuzhou, but headwinds had held them back so they decided to land at a small airfield on the island of Xiamen. They had just sufficient visibility to discern some power cables and made their landing in the gloom. They had a warm welcome which turned a little sour when a giggling girl presented Brian with a landing charge of $850. They were the first private aircraft of any kind that had arrived at Xiamen. Brian laughed at the bill and after some haggling it was reduced to $550. They reached Fuzhou the following morning, managing to haggle the landing charge down from $850 to $100 this time, and continued on their way, flying over chequered farmland and more mountains which were as rugged as those of Vietnam.
They reached Shanghai on 28 April, but their bureaucratic troubles were now increasing. Brian had been unable to get advance permission for the flight from either Japan or Russia, though it was not for want of trying. In Japan, which has 2,500 microlight pilots, no microlight is allowed to fly beyond one mile of its home airport. This was going to make it difficult to fly the length of the country.
While their home base wrestled with the Japanese authorities, Brian and Keith flew from Shanghai over the Yellow Sea, in thick cloud as usual, to Cheju, an island off the southern tip of South Korea, hoping to enter Japan. The Japanese relented, but were going to charge them $1,200 for every landing. Brian could see his funds draining away. Nonetheless, they were getting plenty of interest, being feted by the press and local microlight pilots in Korea and then in Japan as they flew up to Sapporo and their next crisis.
They were expecting two vital parcels, one containing spare passports with visas for Russia, and the other a replacement GPS for one that had broken down (they had been using their handheld Garmin to find the way across China and japan). The visas had been sent to Shanghai, but rather than lose time waiting for them to arrive, Brian had decided to fly on and let them catch up with him and Keith at Sapporo. Neither parcel had arrived. The GPS was stuck in Japanese Customs and, more worrying, the passports with the Russian visas were still in Chinese Customs. They were marooned in Sapporo in an expensive hotel for eight days until at last the GPS and visas arrived but they still did not have clearance to fly through Siberia. They were now forty-nine days into the flight. It was going to be difficult completing it in just thirty days.
Brian wanted to take off anyway and argue their way through once they had reached Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, while Keith was more cautious, saying that he wasn’t prepared to risk his life for the flight. It was a tighter from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk which had shot down the Korean Boeing 747 that had strayed into Russian air space. Brian was relying on an organisation called the East-West Association to smooth their journey across Siberia and at last on 13 May their representative, Valeri, phoned to say permission had been granted. The following morning they set out for the flight over Hokkaido and the thirty-mile leap across La Perouse Strait to Sakhalin Island. As they approached the northern coast of Japan they got in touch with the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk air traffic control only to be told that they did not have permission to land after all and must return to Sapporo. That day Keith had the controls and Brian sat in the back in a state of rage and misery, thinking out what his next step should be, when the radio from Sapporo came on again to say that they had permission after all. They swung round jubilant, and headed for Russia.
As they landed and taxied in past rusting helicopters and big transport aircraft, Brian could not but notice the contrast with the tidiness and wealth of Japan. But the officials were welcoming, though food at the Sapporo Hotel was expensive with steaks at $18 a time. Both pilots were also impressed by the big blonde girls with long legs and broad smiles who seemed to inhabit the town. They were going to get to know them and the officials all too well before escaping. But that night they were full of hope. It was just a few days flight up Sakhalin and along the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk and they would be poised to cross the Bering Strait and then, whatever the physical challenges, their struggles with bureaucracy would be over.
However, the next morning they were told that the military authorities would not allow them to fly any further into Russia. It was to be a long drawn out war of attrition that eventually destroyed the already shaky partnership between Brian and Keith. They were to be stuck in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk for more than a fortnight. Brian battled with bureaucracy both on the phone to London and Moscow and locally through Valeri, while Keith watched television. Both found some solace with the local girls, Keith proceeding to fall in love with one of them. But the tension between the two men grew with inaction and Brian was faced with ever-mounting bills. Keith was asking for more money once his originally contracted time had run out, and he was also threatening to leave for home if their visas, which were about to expire, were not renewed.
They discussed many options, one of which was for GT Global to be escorted across Siberia by a Russian chase plane. The cost however could have been around $100,000. With Keith talking of returning to Britain, Brian came up with a cheaper option, trying to persuade a Russian navigator to fly in the spare seat across Siberia. And then their visas were extended, but by this time Brian had decided that taking a Russian navigator was the only option. He told Keith to take a scheduled flight to Alaska and wait for him at Nome on the other side of the Bering Strait.
As if he hadn’t troubles enough, he now learnt that Liechtenstein Global Trust, his sponsor, was being taken over and his one good friend and ally in the company was going to be out of a job. At least in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk he had managed to obtain the services of senior navigator Peter Kusmich Petrov for a mere $245 a day. The next leg of the journey was on.
It was at this point he learnt that Keith had decided to drop out of the flight altogether and was preparing to fly home from Alaska. The plot developed with Brian being told that Keith would consider remaining on the flight provided he could fly the craft solo from Nome to Anchorage, in other words placing Brian in the same position as himself, of having missed out part of the flight and, in the process, invalidating the entire record should they complete the circumnavigation. Brian dismissed the suggestion and Keith flew home to England. It must have been particularly tough for Brian, on his own in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk with this series of phone calls from London and Anchorage from people whom, on the whole, he didn’t trust. It says a lot for his single-mindedness of purpose that he didn’t give up.
It was 2 June, day seventy-one, when at last Brian and Peter Kusmich Petrov started flying up Sakhalin Island and then tracking the coast over the frozen Sea of Okhotsk. It was the most desolate, empty yet beautiful country that Brian had ever seen. He felt comfortable with his passenger who even enjoyed taking photographs and operating the wing cameras. Keith’s lack of co-operation in this department had always been a source of tension. But it was a serious place to fly, with uninhabited mountains and some big storm clouds building up. They were heading for Magadan on the northern shore of the Sea of Okhotsk. It didn’t look as if they could make it to their destination before being caught by the storm so Brian decided to land on one of the roads they could now see below them. It was a rough landing that ended with the craft’s front wheel dropping into a hole, breaking the landing lights and then being flipped over on its side by the wind, but there didn’t seem any serious structural damage. Peter, however, was not keen to get back in the air before the craft had been checked by experts, though where he was going to find any in the middle of the Siberian steppe was not at all obvious.
Brian volunteered to fly GT Global on to Magadan by himself. After a shaky take-off he was airborne, only to find that the damage was greater than he had anticipated, with the trike pointing in a different direction from the wing. But he was not unduly concerned since he had encountered the same problem on other occasions. His vertigo had vanished, driven away by all the other traumas of the flight. It took Peter a full day to catch up with him in Magadan and then they went on together.
They reached Provideniya, just south of the Bering Strait, on the evening of day seventy-nine. In terms of distance, Brian had covered 12,848 miles and still had 10,054 to go; he had come just over halfway round the world in eighty days. But 200 nautical miles to the east was Nome and America. Whatever the challenges that might be ahead, he would at last be among people who spoke his own language and in the familiar western culture. Just 200 miles to go!
He had made sea crossings of similar length before, but there was something about the dark cold sea dotted with ice floes that was particularly threatening – the feeling of flying over the jaws of a trap. The djinn of his earlier travels was just waiting to pounce. About a hundred miles out the cloud began to build up in layers. He decided to try to climb over it, plunging into the featureless white mist and clawing his way up to a height of 5,400 feet. Peter suddenly shouted in his ear: ‘Ice.’ Brian had been concentrating so hard on keeping their craft level and on course with the GPS, he hadn’t noticed that they were coated in ice-their clothes, wing, flying wires and his visor, clouding his vision even further. At least they were now in contact with Anchorage air traffic control who promptly declared an emergency. Brian dropped height, weaved his way in and out of the cloud, and at last saw the coast ahead. He had made it to America. A little more flying and he bounced GT Global down on the runway at Nome. At last he could relax. ‘America was bliss after Russia: toilets with seats, sinks with plugs, taps marked hot water which told the truth, shops and cafes open late in the evening, where food was served cheerfully and not as if a huge favour was being done.’
But he still had a long way to go, and he wasn’t even taking the fastest route, for Phileas Fogg had flown via San Francisco. Brian had to think positively. He had by this point lost thirty-three days grounded for bureaucratic reasons but if he could not go round the world in a total of eighty days, he reckoned he could still make the flight in eighty days’ flying time. He was short of money, had just enough from the original sponsorship payment to complete the flight and pay off Peter, but not enough to market the venture, which he needed to do to help promote his book sales and the film he had made at his own cost.
And Brian was now on his own, though in many ways this made everything that much simpler. ‘I trusted me. My arguments with myself were fair-minded and self-interested.’
There was some challenging flying on his way across Alaska with the engine overheating once again, but he solved the problems, kept the djinn at bay, and continued flying down through Canada and into the States. At San Francisco he learnt that Amvesco, who had bought Liechtenstein Global Trust, had finally decided to withdraw their sponsorship. Brian had a final flirtation with Virgin before deciding to go it alone. With a renewed sense of freedom he flew on along Route 80, beside the railroad followed by Phileas Fogg, past Chicago and New York, pausing to do a photo call by the Statue of Liberty, and then back into the wilderness as he picked his way over the forests of New York State and north-east Canada.
The Atlantic had been crossed by microlight in 1990 by a Dutch pilot named Eppo Newman, travelling from east to west, but he had taken more than a year organising the flight, wrestling with red tape and waiting for the right weather. Brian wanted to complete his flight quickly, and pushed the limits throughout this last leg, flying over pathless mountains and tundra to reach Kuujjuaq on the shores of Ungava Bay, and then across the Hudson Strait to Baffin Island with its jagged granite peaks and sheer rock walls. Brian felt a euphoria:
‘As the canyon narrowed I circled close to the mountain walls, surging with joy. Instead of racing in a straight line, I roller-coastered over the sky, diving and climbing and turning, so overcome by the terrific scenery I felt blithe and spiritual. At the same time a small voice kept saying, “Don’t take chances now, you are so close”.’ He was unaware that these granite walls were the playground of extreme climbers or how similar to his were their motivation and feelings.
He landed on Broughton Island for his next sea crossing which was to Greenland. This was his most northerly point, just a few degrees north of the Arctic Circle. There was yet another bureaucratic delay while the Danish flight authorities, with whom he had been negotiating since the previous September, raised some last ditch objections. However, after three days he was at last given the green light and took off over the empty seas of the Davis Strait to reach the west coast of Greenland. The biggest hurdle of all, the Greenland Ice Cap, was ahead. Reaching 9,000 feet in height and some 384 miles across on the flight path Brian was planning to take, local pilots doubted it could be crossed without flying to 10,000 feet.
When Brian set out from Sondrestrom the following morning, he had been warned of a front coming in and, as he reached the permanent snows of the ice cap, the white piling clouds were already merging with the white of the snow. Caution prevailed and he turned back while there was still time to find his way to the safety of Sondrestrom. Another day’s wait, and on the morning of 13 July with the forecast better, Brian set out once again.
At first it was clear and he reached a height of 8,500 feet. It was bitterly cold and then his radio failed. He felt a sense of total isolation. True, he had the emergency radio, but he would have had to take his gloves off to rummage for the back-up system and it was much too cold for that. He flew on, briefly reassured by a sighting of the small unmanned emergency weather station in the middle of the ice cap. He could at least land there in the event of an emergency, but a thin layer of cloud slipped in between him and the featureless white of the ice cap. He decided to keep above it, was forced up to 10,000 feet, then 12,000 feet, higher than he had ever flown before.
The air was getting thin and he was gasping for breath. It was also bitterly cold with ice forming on his visor threatening once more to impede his vision. The cloud below was so thick that he could see nothing of the ice cap. Had the engine failed his chances of survival were minimal. He flew in this white limbo for five hours until at last he became conscious of a change in the far distance from white to blue and slowly the shapes of mountain peaks and deep cut fjords emerged. He had crossed his high hurdle and as he lost height and it became warmer, he was able to dig out his emergency radio and make contact with air traffic control, firstly back at Sondrestrom and then at Kulusuk on a little island off the east coast of Greenland.
He was now faced by his longest ocean crossing, 450 miles to Reykjavik, capital of Iceland, though he had a slightly shorter option of flying into Dagverdhara, an airstrip on a peninsula that jutted out towards Greenland. He couldn’t help being apprehensive. It was going to take his fuel capacity to the limit and the prevailing wind tended to be an easterly which would be against him. He had already learnt to his cost how much even a light headwind slowed him down and increased his fuel consumption. That morning there was a westerly at the airstrip, but how long would it last? He decided to set out, thinking he could always turn back.
At first all went well. He had a ground speed, checked out by his GPS, of fifty knots. This would take him to Dagverdhara in six and a half hours, but as he flew over the empty ocean, nursing the engine to keep the revs down, he noticed the speed steadily dropping. The wind had changed direction and he was battling into a head wind. He dropped to forty-three knots, but still kept going. It was a similar problem to that of a climber going for the summit of Everest. There is a turn back time to enable you get back safely before dark and a temptation to ignore it as you get closer to the summit. In this instance Brian, who still had a long way to go, swung the craft round and headed back for Kulusuk at a galloping speed of sixty-one knots, a clear sign of just how strong had been the head wind and how right his decision.
And yet, on getting back to Kulusuk and checking his fuel he was surprised to find how little he had used. Perhaps he could have made it after all? He resolved to go for it, come what may. Next morning the weather forecast was ambiguous but he decided to set out nonetheless. At first it went well with a good fast ground speed of sixty-five knots. He had a following wind that he hadn’t expected which lasted for a couple of hours. Then came a change in the weather that was almost imperceptible, a thin haze that gradually thickened. He was now nearly four hours from the start and had crossed the point of no return when the front hit him.
‘I came to a wall of heavy rain across my path, and as it approached and I could feel it engulf me, I tried to find anywhere as a refuge. It looked slightly clearer over to the left so I turned and flew that way and found my way round the thickest and most opaque sheets of falling water. This happened time and again. I tried to find the clearest patches and the darker areas of low cloud that showed the bottom limits of where I could fly and still see where I was going. I was thrown up and down, rearing up to 800 feet in the dynamic lift, or falling to 450 feet, constantly wiping the water from my visor, peering at the GPSs to see what they told me. At one time I was making eleven knots and the estimate for getting to Reykjavik had climbed to eighteen hours. Seeing twenty-two knots was commonplace; it meant I was heading too far north into the teeth of the Atlantic gale. My course was erratic anyway because of the way I was being thrown around.’
He didn’t have time to be afraid and was even elated by the struggle, commenting:
‘There are moments beyond fear, as I had expected, where life is so fulfilling you cannot believe it and you want to go back and live it again and again. I was carried back constantly into that experience by the frontal gale, but each time I got a little closer to Iceland.’
He fought the winds and turbulence for a further three hours before reaching the lee of Iceland. The wind fell, the sky began to clear and he was able to see the high glacier that marked Dagverdhara, but he elected to push on to Reykjavik, where his film crew were waiting for him and he could truly celebrate his longest and most challenging ocean crossing.
But the flight wasn’t over. He was forced to turn back on his first attempt to cross from eastern Iceland to the Faroes and it took him two days to get through the Scottish Highlands, which gave their worst of rain and storm.
At last, on 21 July with an escort of microlights, he flew into Brooklands, 121 days after he had set out on his momentous round-the-world adventure. It was a remarkable achievement. He had flown altogether seventy-one days and had lost thirty-five to bureaucratic hassles. Almost half the journey he had flown by himself and arguably he would have been better off had he been on his own all the way. Certainly his finest moments had been the pure elation of battling alone with the elements over the Greenland Ice Cap and across the storm-wracked seas between Greenland and Iceland.
In all his ventures Brian had a strong sense of history and the romance aviation. As a journalist he approached his circumnavigation as a story that he wanted to tell well, something that Keith could never understand or empathise with. It was an amazing achievement, of dogged bloody-minded tenacity and the taking of some huge risks by a man who was fighting his fear and, at times, just about everyone around him. It was a great adventure.