One HELI of a ride

No one loves the high life quite like daredevil Jules Mountain. But five years ago, after surviving an aggressive form of cancer, he took on his riskiest challenge yet... piloting a single-engine helicopter at 14,000ft across the ice-covered Arctic

- By Jane Warren

MOST OF us would balk at crossing the polar ice cap in a single-engine helicopter with no autopilot and no oxygen supply — one which could fly for just three hours on a single tank of fuel. Especially so if we had only been a pilot for a couple of years. But Jules Mountain, as his befitting surname would suggest, isn't most people.

"I've never been good at following rules I don't believe in," says the 59-year-old maverick entrepreneur and adventurer, sipping tea in the garden of his Guernsey home. "If I can't see their logic, I just can't stick to them."

After surviving an aggressive form of cancer and scaling Mount Everest in 2015 - and in the process nearly dying in Nepal's deadliest earthquake in living memory he took on what even he now admits was his most dangerous challenge yet.

In 2020, armed with a supply of Wine Gums to stop the high-altitude wilderness fidgets, he piloted a single-engine helicopter across the Arctic from Canada to the UK, across the harshest, coldest landscape on Earth, in one of the most audacious journeys in modern aviation history.

Now, he's written a captivating and hugely exciting memoir of his achievement; full of old-school derring-do, it's a true Boy's Own adventure for the modern age. The Bell 505 helicopter wasn't even his. It belonged to a friend who'd just bought it from a factory in Canada, intending to have it shipped back to the Channel Islands.

But when his friend mentioned this sensible plan, Jules, ever the adventurer, made a daring counter-proposal.

"I said, 'Why not fly it back instead?'" he says, with a grin. ""Give it a proper test flight."

To anyone else, it would have sounded insane. The five-seater aircraft was designed to carry golf clubs, not fly thousands of miles on an eight-day trip, with fuel stops in some of the most desolate outposts imaginable.