Reaching For The Sky

- Karen McGhee

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.

I FIRST 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.