Brian Milton

Brian Milton, British author, journalist and adventurer, was the first person to fly an open-cockpit, flexwing ultralight around the world in 1998. On an earlier ultralight flight in 1987 from London to Sydney, he fell into the Persian Gulf on Christmas Day in the middle of the Iran/Iraq War. Milton managed to rescue his aircraft after 6 hours in the water and flew on to Australia. However, this was not his first brush with death. In 1978, he was practicing in one of the first motorized hang-gliders. At a height of 250 feet, the wings of the prototype glider collapsed and Milton, unable to open his parachute in time, plummeted to the ground. Miraculously, he survived with severe bruising and broken bones. That evening on the BBC Nine O'Clock News, newscaster Angela Rippon described the battered pilot as "the luckiest man alive."

Milton has received numerous prestigious awards for his achievements as an ultralight (microlight) and hang-glider pilot. In 1985, HM The Queen presented Milton with the British Hang Glider Association's National Trophy for his outstanding services to British hang gliding in its first 10 years. For his record-breaking world flight in 1998, Milton won the Royal Aero Club’s premier prize, the Britannia Trophy.

Milton has written more than a dozen books, including 'Hurricane: The last Witnesses,' about the WWII fighter plane, as well as 'The Lancaster and the Tirpitz,' with Dambuster Squadron pilot Tony Iveson DFC. As a young man, Milton set off from London in a 1937 Austin 7 Ruby to drive across the Sahara and down through the Congo to marry his fiancee. The car, called Alexa, didn’t make it out of the Congo, but the story later emerged as a book called 'Alexa: The Life and Death of an Austin 7 Ruby.'

You can find out more about Brian Milton and his many adventures via the following links:

Website: http://www.brian-milton.com/

Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Milton