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Zapcat Racing Ltd
The Granary and Bakery Building,
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Weevil Lane,
Gosport,
PO12 1FX
E mail: info@zapcat-racing.com
Tel: 02392 526000
Fax: 02392 526252
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| Blind Adventurer aims for Zapcat first |
| Thursday, 30 August 2007 |
Blind adventurer Miles Hilton-Barber, who made history last week by becoming the first blind person to pilot a jet fighter plane, is aiming for another “first” when he joins the teams of the 2007 Zapcat National Championship in Bournemouth this weekend.
He wants to become the first blind person to pilot one of the high-performance 340bhp Zapcats, highly manoeuvrable inflatable catamarans capable of speeds of up to 50mph and pulling more than 2G in the tightest of turns.
Miles, 58, lost his sight more than 25 years ago but his thirst for adventure and refusal to allow himself to be restricted by his condition means he has achieved more than most of us would even dare think about. He has, in the last six years alone, set numerous world records while undertaking extreme endurance events in Siberia and across the Sahara, Gobi, Qatar and Mojave Deserts.
He has also climbed in the Himalayas, Kilimanjaro, Mt. Blanc, scuba-dived on wrecks beneath the Red Sea, hot-air ballooned over the Nevada Desert, man-hauled a sledge over 400 kilometres across Antarctica and set the world lap record for a blind driver on the Malaysian Grand Prix Circuit. He is the first blind person to fly the English Channel in a microlight and holds the British duel microlight high-altitude record, climbing to 20,300 feet.
In March this year he captured the world’s imagination undertaking another world record by completing a 55-day, 21,500-kilometre microlight flight more than half-way around the world from London to Sydney, Australia, relying on revolutionary speech-output technology, accompanied by his sighted co-pilot.
Earlier this month Miles became the first blind pilot in world history to fly a sortie of extreme aerobatics at more than 600mph in a Hawker Hunter jet fighter, accompanied by an ex-Red Arrows pilot, setting a blind world air speed record in the process.
Now he has set his sights on a new target – to pilot one of the boats from the world’s largest one-design powerboat series, the 2007 Zapcat National Championship. He will be undertaking his latest challenge when the racers hit Bournemouth this weekend for Rounds 9 and 10 of the series.
Miles’s non-stop activity isn’t just about satisfying his desire to achieve great heights, depths and speeds. It is about raising money for the charity Seeing is Believing which is aiming to raise £5 million by World Sight Day 2010, helping to eradicate preventable blindness in children in the developing world through cataract operations and other medical procedures.
All funds raised by Miles through his Zapcat challenge will be doubled by the Standard Chartered Bank, which also meets all the administrative costs of the charity, ensuring every penny raised goes direct to the medical costs of the sight restoration programme.
“It only costs £30 to remove cataracts from a child’s eyes and give them back their sight,” says Miles. “It’s such a small amount of money. I’ll never see again in this life but if I can give children the gift of sight it will all be worth it.”
Co-pilot for Miles’s challenge will be George “Boris” Stroud from Ellon, Aberdeenshire. He will be piloting the same boat, 09 Marin Subsea / Delta Jets, in the Championship.
“I watched him fly the Hawker Hunter at Delta Jets at Kemble,” says Boris. “He’s an ambassador for what he does and the Delta Jets race team immediately offered to take him out in a Zapcat. We’re very honoured to have him on board.”
Miles will be starting his challenge following the 10.30am safety briefing and before the pre-race practise sessions begin on Saturday 1 September at West Beach, next to the pier in Bournemouth.
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