Blind pilot flies from London to Sydney

Hilton-Barber flies with a sighted co-pi lot but relies on speech output from his navigation instruments to steer his course, directing the plane from a wireless keyboard.

“I’ve wanted to be a pilot since I was a kid. Now I’m totally blind and I’ve had the privilege of flying more than halfway around the world. The big deal is not me doing this, it’s raising funds,” he said.

Hilton-Barber, who has been blind for 25 years, hopes the trip will raise some $ 2 million for the charity Seeing is Believing, which works to cut the incidence of preventable blindness in developing countries.

In 1999, Hilton-Barber completed the “toughest footrace on earth” — 250 kilometres across the Sahara Desert — before running in the “coldest marathon on earth”, the Siberian Ice Marathon.

He has climbed Mt Kilimanjaro and Mt Blanc, Africa and Europe’s highest mountains, and set the Malaysian Grand Prix lap record for a blind driver in a 200 kilometre per hour Lotus.