Fight or flight

When hang-gliding champion Helen Ross Lee suffered a traumatic brain injury after a crash, she had to learn to walk, talk, eat and write again. She shares her story of courage, resilience and love with Alley Pascoe.

- Alley Pascoe

“Not being earthbound is quite extraordinary. It feels like total freedom,” says Helen Ross Lee, describing the transcendent experience of soaring through the air while hang-gliding. Helen was first introduced to the sport in 1984 when she ventured down to the hang-gliding launch site in Newcastle’s Merewether. At the age of 23, she fell in love with flying – and with her first husband – on the same day.

“Flying a hang-glider felt as natural to me as writing with my left hand,” says Helen, who is indeed left-handed. At the start of her hanggliding love affair, she spent months soaring back and forth along the Merewether cliffs, before moving to the Murray River with her new husband. There she honed her hang-gliding skills at Mount Elliot, while trying to raise her profile in the sport and find sponsorship deals.

In 1991, Helen travelled to Austria to compete in the Women’s World Hang-Gliding Championships. Later that year, she became the first person to launch a hang-glider from Australia’s second-highest peak, Mount Townsend (2209 metres) in the Snowy Mountains. The next year she competed in the Australian Open championships, where she won the women’s title. For four consecutive years, she was ranked among the top 10 female hang-glider pilots in the world.

“Helen was well known through the hang-gliding community for her passion and dedication to flying,” says Brett Coupland, the Chief Operations Officer at the Sports Aviation Federation of Australia. “She played a pivotal role in encouraging women to spread their wings and progress their flying abilities through hang-gliding.”