Reaching for the sky
Flying ace and 2013 Australian Geographic Young Adventurer of the Year, Ryan Campbell, has a message to take to the world – and nothing can stop him.
Flying ace Ryan Campbell survived a horror crash – and gained a purpose.
FOR RYAN CAMPBELL, every up and down in life is an opportunity, every bump in the road a chance to change direction and evolve for the better. It’s hard, in fact, not to think of every corny aphorism you’ve ever heard when you talk with him. ‘You get knocked down, you get up again.’ ‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’
“I’m a very ‘glass half-full’ kind of person, always have been,” he agrees with a laugh, adding his cliché of choice to the list. “You won’t get me to tell you all the negative stuff – I’m not that person.”
That’s not to say he hasn’t had some “very low moments” since his body was shattered when the Tiger Moth he was piloting crashed, due to engine failure, on the Gold Coast just after Christmas 2015.
“At 100 foot, the engine stopped and three seconds later it was all over,” Ryan recalls. “How it didn’t burn I don’t know.”
It was two weeks before his 22nd birthday and he would celebrate that milestone as a paraplegic.
IFIRST MET RYAN at Australian Geographic’s annual awards ceremony in 2016, 11 months after the accident; he was hobbling on crutches and dragging his mostly unresponsive legs. But he was still the tall, strapping pilot I recalled from media shots when he became the youngest person to f ly solo around the world as a 19-year-old, in 2013. He was wobbly but had that air of humble invincibility I’d sensed in every great adventurer I’d met, from 20th-century pioneering aviatrix Nancy Bird Walton, to mountain climber Greg Mortimer, to solo Antarctic sailor Lisa Blair.
It’s because of the AG connection that Ryan’s agreed to this interview, his f irst since the accident. At AG, we understand adventurers – we get their drive, their need for discovery, their search for the new. And it’s the adventure community, Ryan says, that’s helped get him through an extraordinary recovery during the past three years – along with outstanding medical attention, scores of operations, medical appointments and procedures that continue today, and his large, close-knit family on the New South Wales South Coast.
We meet in a bar, near the hospital where he’s now spent much too much of his early 20s, before an appointment for his still-broken ankle – just one enduring legacy of the crash. He orders a bourbon and Coke and settles back to tell me about the recovery and, more importantly, the exciting new career paraplegia has
steered him towards. He has one small stipulation: we aren’t to use the image that went around the world of him lying in that crumpled Tiger Moth. He remembers almost every detail of the crash – the descent, the impact, calling triple 0 on his mobile, talking with paramedics for hours as they worked to free him – and he knows those memories will be with him for life.
BACK TO THOSE “LOW MOMENTS” he’s touched on. Ryan never sank quite as deep into the clutches of depression as many of the patients, mostly young men, with whom he lived for many months rehabilitating on the spinal ward at the Prince of Wales Hospital, in Sydney’s east. But did he have the dark, self-destructive thoughts many new paraplegics experience? “No, I wasn’t as far in as everyone else, but I was…” he falters slightly, and I think perhaps that question has pushed too hard. “Um, I now have a very personal understanding of people who do.” It’s a momentary dark insight in an otherwise upbeat, lengthy conversation and he f lips straight back into talk of all the positives he’s achieved in the past three years – lessons to f ly helicopters commercially, ride a motorbike and more.
Ryan realised about six months after his accident that his paraplegia had improved as much as it was going to and that he’d never be the Qantas pilot he’d dreamt of being since his f irst f light on an airliner at the age of six. “There was a list of things that were wrong with me and I thought, ‘They’re all going to get better in their own time, I’ve just got to wait and be patient and I’ll get back to what I want to be,’” Ryan recalls. “But slowly I realised that wasn’t going to be the case. And what that round-the-world f light – everything that happened on it – what that injected into me, and how it developed me as a person, saved me. It really did.”
He explains his physical state before discussing his mental state. “I’m an incomplete paraplegic – when I started I was a complete paraplegic. From the waist down there was no movement and no feeling,” he says. “I can now move and feel the fronts of my legs, fronts of my thighs and my knees, but I can’t feel my feet or the backs of my legs; anywhere I sit I can’t feel. So it’s repaired to some extent.” It means he can’t f ly about 95 per cent of planes because he can’t operate their toe brakes, but he can f ly choppers and modified planes and ride motorbikes. But for Ryan the adventurer, life has always been, and still is, more about what he can do with his head.
“Life is won and lost above the shoulders,” he says. “I don’t care who you are…the fact you are physically injured doesn’t determine whether you’ve got depression or are struggling mentally. It’s something else. There are plenty of able-bodied people with depression.
“A lot of people in spinal wards around the country and around the world need better tools for the mind to be able to come back from the massive life shock that’s now being
injected into their ecosystem. I had people to help me with that and I watched a lot of people who didn’t, so that made me feel pretty lucky.” After the accident he become intrigued by the mental struggles people face. Recently the suicides of two young, apparently physically healthy, teenagers in his local community got him “super-passionate” about youth suicide. “I started getting all these indications of what it’s like to struggle mentally,” he explains, “and I became interested in what makes us tick, what makes adventurers go out and want to do crazy things.”
That’s led him to a new career as an inspirational speaker, passing on the mental toolkit he’s put together as both an adventurer and now a survivor of a major physical trauma. “I’m going to talk for a living about mindset. What are the mental tools you need to benef it your life, not just in the bad times but the good times as well? How does an adventurer function?” he says. Ever the country boy, with a passion for country and western music, he’s moved to Nashville in the USA, where he’ll continue to be based as he grows his new career. He’ll also f ly helicopters for an American company owned by a fellow survivor of a traumatic air crash, Ted Stallings, who’s become a good friend. And, of course, adventures continue to be on his immediate radar.
NEXT YEAR, RYAN plans to f ly a Spitf ire, the famed British single-seat f ighter aircraft used with huge success during World War II. He’s expecting that to be the “biggest adventure of his life”, a big call from someone who f lew around the world alone as a teenager. Ryan has always wanted to f ly warbirds and although his spinal cord injury now renders him unable to f ly most of these historic aircraft, he became inspired while in hospital by Reach for the Sky, the biography of legendary wartime British f lying ace Douglas Bader. After losing both legs in a biplane accident early in the war, Bader was discharged from the Royal Air Force. But, renowned for his dogged ‘never-say-never’ attitude, he fought successfully to be reinstated, going on to become a Spitfire pilot and squadron leader.
Like many modern pilots, Ryan’s long had a fascination for Spitf ires, but has felt a special connection since his accident. They have a handbrake, which he’s able to operate – the same brake system that allowed Bader to return to the skies. Bader’s handicap proved an advantage for him f lying Spitf ires during dog f ights with the enemy. It was thought that his lack of legs meant he wasn’t affected by the g-forces created during the aerial acrobatics required for these battles, which caused most other pilots to momentarily pass out from lack of oxygen to the brain as blood was forced into the legs.
Ryan named the little yellow Piper Cub he bought and had modif ied after his accident Doug, in deference to Bader. As one of the few planes with heel brakes, Doug allowed for Ryan’s own return to the sky. There are only about 35 Spitf ires left worldwide and few pilots who can f ly one, none of whom is aged under 30. Ryan has already travelled to England and had Boltbee Flight Academy assess his suitability for Spitf ire training. “And I’ve been given a big green tick,” he says, excitedly.
Ryan has another Spitfire connection. At those AG awards he hobbled into in 2016, he met the owners of luxury watch company Bremont, Nick and Giles English. Both Nick and Giles have survived their own air crashes. And Nick can f ly Spitfires. The company makes a special watch only for Spitfire pilots, and, says Ryan, “I’m going to make sure I get myself one of those watches.” And you’re left with no doubt that he will.