Born To Fly Read online

  BORN TO FLY

  RYAN CAMPBELL

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  To Mum and Dad,

  Chris, Adam and Claire,

  Ken Evers, Dick Smith,

  my family and friends

  CONTENTS

  Map of the route

  Foreword by Jessica Watson

  1. Finding the magic

  2. A passion and a goal

  3. Closer to the dream

  4. Small steps

  5. Starting to sharpen the axe

  6. In the good old USA

  7. Logistics

  8. Caught in the hype

  9. Nearly there

  10. On the way

  11. Pacific interlude

  12. One leg at a time

  13. The longest leg

  14. The romance of Van Nuys

  15. Southern hospitality

  16. Oshkosh and beyond

  17. The phantom menace

  18. Highs and lows

  19. Around the Mediterranean

  20. On to Jordan

  21. The mysterious East

  22. Across the Indian Ocean

  23. To Malaysia

  24. Back home

  25. Back to destination A

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  FOREWORD

  So many young people have dreams. Big, small, ordinary or extraordinary. But I’ve seen so many young people told that they couldn’t achieve them.

  So many kids have heroes who chase their own dreams, but these heroes are often put on such high pedestals that it’s impossible for kids to believe that they too could also achieve what they want.

  Ryan is one of the rare young people with the audacity to believe that he might just be able to achieve his own dream. He had the courage to stand up to everyone who believed he couldn’t fly solo around the world, and he has become an inspiration to other young people with dreams of their own.

  By setting out to achieve such a huge goal, Ryan showed enormous spirit and courage. Flying around the world solo at any age isn’t for the faint-hearted, and the way Ryan went about achieving his goal showed an extraordinary level of maturity.

  In my own experience of sailing solo around the world, one of the most important components of the adventure was the years of preparation before I even made it to the start line. Ryan showed amazing dedication and worked tirelessly in the years before his flight too.

  I believe the quality and commitment of the preparation show the real quality of an adventurer. I think you’ll find reading about Ryan’s preparation as fascinating as the flight itself.

  Ryan flew almost the same number of miles that I sailed around the world, but he found himself dealing with situations that I couldn’t imagine.

  I hope everyone enjoys reading about Ryan’s adventures, and again, congratulations to him on his amazing flight. I hope, too, that his story provides inspiration and shows that we all have the ability to achieve incredible things.

  Jessica Watson OAM

  CHAPTER

  1

  Finding the magic

  It was a calm and clear morning. It was also my fifteenth birthday. We rolled down the runway in the fabric-covered lightweight Gazelle and pointed the aircraft skywards. I was defying gravity and the laws of physics in a way that millions have only dreamed of, and I was eager to impress my instructor. My nervous hand gripped the control stick as I worked through my checklist of tasks, making sure that every phase was successful and nothing had been forgotten. My instructor Mark, with whom I had only flown twice before, sat quietly and watched, making himself as invisible as possible. He kept a keen eye on my every move.

  We zoomed through the skies above the Sapphire Coast, a stunning stretch of Australia’s eastern seaboard that sits about halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. We reviewed the skills absorbed throughout my flight training, testing my ability to fly the aircraft in all configurations and simulating various failures in our little two-seater machine. Finally we taxied back to the aero club.

  ‘Keep her running,’ Mark said. The words I had been nervously waiting for. My heart began to beat faster and my grip on the control stick tightened even more. Mark slowly and calmly unplugged his headset and tidied up as if he had just been to the shops. With one last look he told me to fly three takeoffs and landings. He added that I should also remember to ‘lock the door and have fun’. And then he climbed out of the plane.

  I locked the door. Not too sure about the other thing he said. I checked and double-checked. I glanced over to a group of family members, including my very nervous Mum, and waved goodbye. I taxied through the grass to the runway and with a shaky voice I keyed the microphone and lined up on the centreline.

  With a push of the throttle I hurtled down the runway. As I took off I noticed that with only one pilot the aircraft felt completely different, much lighter. And faster too: just before I reached the end of the runway it was already time to turn. Ticking off the checks as I went, I levelled off above the pristine coastline. As I took a breath I looked to the right. For the first time the seat next to me was empty, its belts neatly folded. Now I truly felt that I was alone, that I truly was making my first solo flight.

  The trees were so small and the cars zipped around on the most realistic and widespread slot car track one could imagine. The clouds were above me and the ocean lay below with boats resembling bath toys. These were all things I had seen before, all the things that had made me fall in love with aviation, but this time it was different. I no longer felt like a student constantly wondering whether the instructor had ‘helped you out a little bit’. This time it was just the aircraft and me.

  Physics had never been my strong point in high school, but I did know that what goes up must come down. I had successfully gone up, but now I had to do the other part. I reduced the power and pushed the nose towards the earth. Carefully monitoring height and speed, I glided towards the runway when a group of people caught my eye. They were all looking skyward, shielding their eyes with a salute to the sun, a sight typical of airfields the world over. With the instructor’s voice ringing in my ears I held the wheels inches from the ground and further reduced the power, and very soon heard the landing gear rumble as I met the earth once again. The relief that flowed through me was immense, and I couldn’t prevent a smile that felt it was stretching from ear to ear.

  I had flown an aircraft solo. I was a pilot.

  I have never really understood why the fact that it’s possible to hurtle through the sky, to soar above the ground in a machine, is no longer magical for so many people. Now flying is a matter of going to an airport with baggage that’s overweight, queuing to get into a huge metal cylinder and settling into your seat only to realise that the baby in seat 22A is crying. A lot of people don’t see that watching a 747 lift off the runway is a sort of miracle: how can something that size get into the air? On the other hand, there are pilots who, when they’re not flying, are playing with model planes or manoeuvring them around on the computer. There are people who are totally involved with flying, and with planes, and they’re keeping the magic alive, taking the science away from aviation to some extent. That’s what I have always tried to do.

  Flying was in my genes to some degree. I was born in Cooma in southern New South Wales on 13 January 1994, the last of three boys. In the early stages of my life we lived about eighty kilometres south of where I was born, on a farm not too far from Bombala, a small rural town with a population of just over one thousand. Down the road was a farmhouse, thousands of acres and an airstrip known as Yarrawonga. The land belonged to my grandparents, and this was where my Dad, Lindsay, grew up.

  His father, my granddad, was a farmer, but his early dreams had involved a life that was much le
ss bound to the earth. In the 1920s, when he was young, pioneering aviators were taking to the skies, breaking records and achieving unheard-of feats. These pilots became heroes, making headlines across the world; air races thrilled audiences and aircraft began crossing stretches of ocean and land never seen from above. And Australia’s greatest hero and my grandfather’s idol was the Australian pilot Sir Charles Kingsford Smith.

  He was born in Brisbane in 1897, moved to Canada with his family soon after and settled back in Sydney in 1909. He turned eighteen a year after World War I broke out and joined the Australian Army, then known as the Australian Infantry Forces, and fought at Gallipoli. In 1917 he transferred to Britain’s Royal Flying Corps where he undertook flight and combat training. After being wounded in aerial combat he flew as a flight instructor until he was demobilised in 1919.

  Kingsford Smith knew that he wanted to keep flying more than anything else. After the war he ran joyride flights in England and the United States, as well as barnstorming – being a stunt pilot and performing popular tricks with aeroplanes at fairs and shows. Barnstorming was a very popular way for former Air Force flyers to make some money; in the United States there was even a barnstorming season, which ran from early spring until after the harvest and county fairs in the autumn.

  Kingsford Smith settled back in Australia in 1921. His ambition was to be the first pilot to fly across the Pacific Ocean, but he knew he would need money for that. And so he continued barnstorming in order to raise funds. He would take an aircraft around rural Australia, landing in paddocks and small airstrips in order to give ordinary Australians the experience of flying. In 1928 he achieved his ambition, making the first trans-Pacific flight from the United States to Australia in his legendary plane the Southern Cross. He was also the first pilot to cross the Australian mainland nonstop, he made the first flight across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand and crossed the Pacific from Australia to the United States for the first time. Not only that, but he flew from Australia to London, setting a new record of ten and a half days for the journey.

  When my grandfather was a young boy Kingsford Smith landed the Southern Cross in Bombala, Granddad’s home town, on a barnstorming tour. Granddad was desperate to fly, and so was the rest of the family – except his father, who was an ‘If I was meant to fly I would have feathers and a beak’ type of man. However, he figured if his entire family was going to go down ‘in one of those aeroplane things’ then he might as well go with them. And so they all climbed aboard the Southern Cross and set off into the sky. My family’s relationship with aviation had begun.

  Granddad passed on his love of flying to the rest of the family; he himself acquired his private pilot’s licence and flew a total of 222 hours and 22 minutes. His son, my uncle, became a commercial pilot and now owns and runs Merimbula Air Services, and my dad’s a private pilot. One of my brothers is a commercial pilot and the other one is learning to fly. I had my own first flying lesson when I was fourteen, my first solo flight at fifteen. At seventeen I studied for my private pilot’s licence and passed that, and in April 2012 I passed my commercial licence.

  In 1998 my parents, brothers and I packed up and moved about eighty-five kilometres east to Merimbula, a small tourist town on the Sapphire Coast surrounded by beautiful beaches and crystal-clear ocean. Dad took a job as the local milkman and my mum, whose name is Joanne, attempted to steer three young sons in the right direction. I loved living in Merimbula, with the beach practically on our doorstep. Not only did we have a great outdoor lifestyle but we were still only an hour away from family in Bombala.

  I started kindergarten in 1999 at the Bega Valley Christian College. My brother Adam was in Year 2, and my eldest brother Chris was beginning high school. The thirty-five-kilometre bus ride to school was long and winding, stopping and starting every five minutes until we arrived moments before the bell. We would all gather at the morning assembly, discussing the topics of the day before we all headed to our different classrooms. Because it was a small school we seemed to know pretty much everyone, and they knew you too. Even if people didn’t know exactly who I was, they knew I was ‘the little Campbell’.

  Primary school was okay I guess. I’ve always been the sort of person who likes knowing how things work, how to put them together. When I can see a practical use for something I can usually do it. But I could never learn things from textbooks. Sitting at a desk was never my favourite pastime for a start, I didn’t like the hours spent learning ‘running writing’. (I never actually received my pen licence, I should look into that.) And I never much enjoyed sports days with everyone sitting back and observing my less than perfect high jump technique. But I did make regular appearances in the swimming carnival ‘splash and dash’, the cluttered race across the pool where the aim was not to drown yourself or others.

  In retrospect, I have to say that the highlights of my primary school years were the holidays. Through various business promotions Mum and Dad were able to take us overseas; a number of tickets towards an overseas holiday were awarded depending on the amount of dairy produce sold through Dad’s work as the local milkman. When the coolrooms become overstocked with huge amounts of orange juice we knew it was time to start packing our bags. It was a way of affording the unaffordable. Our first trip – the first time away from Australia for all of us – was to Vanuatu when I was six. I had taken a week off from Year 1. I was confident I could catch up.

  I think it is fair to say that this trip changed my life forever. I sat down in the enormous jet and strapped into my seat with no idea what was coming. The seat towered in front of me, yet if I stretched just a little I could peek out the window. The wing was so long, so much longer than I ever imagined and when I looked closely I could see that it was covered in all sorts of doors and levers. Maybe that was how it flew?

  The engines boomed to life as the stewardesses showed us how to use a life jacket. I thought that was a little strange; after all, we weren’t going swimming. We bumped along the taxiway, eyes glued outside as jets disappeared from sight and wheels screeched onto the tarmac. With a shudder from the overhead lockers and a roar from the engines we began our dash down the runway. I will never forget the feeling of being pushed back in the seat and the rumbling that suddenly turns into silence. It was thrilling then, and that sensation still remains one of the highlights of flying for me.

  I looked across Sydney, absolutely blown away by its size. I had no idea cities even got that big and definitely did not know that everyone’s roof was red. We flew through a cloud, we were above the clouds. Planes flew that high?

  When the stewardess asked whether we would like to visit the flight deck and say hello to the pilots my head nearly exploded with excitement. Like ducklings following their mother across the road, my brothers and I followed the stewardess to the front of the plane. One by one we stepped into the cockpit.

  The pilots swivelled in their seats, looked back and said a quick hello. I stood wide-eyed and open-mouthed. There were so many buttons on the console, and they even had to put some on the roof! How did they know which ones to press? And the steering wheel. Why was no one holding the steering wheel? I had a million questions in my mind, but I was too tongue-tied to ask any of them.

  I loved our holiday in Vanuatu, but I just could not wait to get back on that aeroplane.

  Not to go home, just to go flying. That was the day when I decided I would be a jumbo jet pilot when I grew up.

  Meanwhile, primary school turned into high school. I now wore a white shirt instead of a yellow one, not only a constant reminder of my age but also what I had eaten for lunch that day. We began to choose subjects based on our interests, one exercise book became twenty-seven and our backpacks became heavy. Someone decided to put the alphabet into mathematics, which if you asked me was quite unnecessary. But one thing didn’t change – I was going to be a jumbo jet pilot.

  It was an ambition that remained unwavering, except for a short period when I wanted to venture into custom car buil
ding. I loved studying geography and tourism because I was curious about the world and these were travel-based subjects, but I was best at D&T: design and technology, because it was practical. I had no idea how you went about being a jumbo jet pilot, but commonsense said you had to have money, get a driver’s licence, leave school, get a job and learn to fly. Even though my uncle who lived just around the corner had a lot of experience in light aircraft, I never thought to ask him how to learn how to be a pilot. And although I had heard family stories about Granddad and Kingsford Smith, Granddad had died when I was too young to ask him about all that.

  When I was twelve or thirteen, in between doing last-minute essays and school projects I sometimes thought were a bit pointless, I started my research.

  I was never a great reader – I can only remember a couple of books I read cover to cover by choice, and one of those was nonfiction about spaceships – but I really got into aviation magazines. I wanted to know how other people had started their careers in aviation, and I read everything I could and used the internet. Unlike lots of other aviation-mad kids I never built models; I do it now, but then I was more interested in getting into the real thing. Any lunchtime at school, any spare time I had, I was thinking about and talking about planes. All my friends were sick of hearing about them. I couldn’t wait to finish high school and get some sort of job that would support my flight training. Naturally I assumed I would need a driver’s licence before being able to fly a plane.

  One day when I was fourteen, I was wandering around the house trying to find something to do. I sat down at the kitchen table and flipped through the local newspaper, mostly to see whether there were any cool pictures or people I knew. My eyes locked onto a picture of a young guy sitting in a light aircraft, and the headline was: ‘Young pilot takes to the skies at 15.’

  No way, I thought, it couldn’t be true. But it was. This was a story about a local kid, not much older than me, who flew an aircraft solo at the age of fifteen. This was beyond anything I had ever imagined, and to say I was jealous would be an understatement. Questions crowded into my mind. The first one was simply, how did he get to the airport?