The Freedom Flight Book
It is with great excitement that I can say the book on Freedom Flight is complete and being published by Struik Publishers ( New Holland Publishers). It will be on the shelf in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, London and also available on the internet through www.kalahari.net, by late June 2006. It will be officially launched at the beginning of July when I get back from this motorbike ride.

A short synopsis of the Freedom Flight expedition.
Alan Honeyborne and myself spent three years planning and organizing an expedition to fly our microlights around the world in 2004. After selling my house and as much as we could, to fund the expedition we took off from Thunder City in Cape Town on the 17th Dec 2003, the date that commemorated the centenary of aviation. It was an incredible flying adventure through Africa, over the Serengeti, across Asia, along the Himalayas and South following the Indonesian islands to Australia. All the time regularly updating our web page www.safreedomflight.com with stories as the adventure unfolded. In Australia we had a brief break from flying and then headed North to Thailand and across the rest of Asia into China where tragedy struck and Alan had a fatal accident. I was left with some very tough decisions to make and after much encouragement from others and for reasons I explain in the book, I decided to continue flying. The Chinese and Russian authorities wisely refused to allow me to continue flying.
This left me with no option but to airfreight to San Francisco where Martin Walker met me and we continued flying across America to Oshkosh and then South through Mexico to a small country, Belize. Tragedy struck again when Martin took a tourist for a pleasure flight. Circumstances made me more determined to not let our expedition be remembered only for it’s tragedies and I flew back to the USA and air freighted to London. I flew out of London, through Europe, across the Sahara desert and South through the rest of Africa for seven challenging weeks until I made it back home to Cape Town achieving a world record for the expedition.

The book describes many details and answers many questions about the expedition. The initial chapters have a lot of Alan’s writings which include his humourous outlook on our experiences and the different countries as we flew through them. His stories challenges even humourous authors like Bill Bryson and others. I follow through explaining details and the motivation for continuing.

Included are over 300 of dramatic aerial and other photos giving a visual perspective of the places and stories.

If you would like me to send you a reminder when the book is available or to buy a copy directly, please send me an email at freedomflightbook@yahoo.com

Adios
Ricky