Mont Blanc hike-and-fly raising £30,000 for charity

A British pilot recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease has succeeded in climbing and flying from the summit of Mt Blanc with his 19-year-old son, who flew tandem with their French guide.

Hugh Burnaby-Atkins, son Eddie and guide Mathieu Cortiale all managed to launch in the narrowest of weather breaks, summiting around 9am on 19 September. When they initially woke up at the old Goüter hut, the wind was so strong the guide told them to go back to bed for an hour. But miraculously, the wind dropped, the clouds parted and they were all able to summit the mountain and take off.

Now Hugh’s on a mission to reach his target of raising £30,000 for Cure Parkinson’s.

“It’s one of the most extraordinary things I’ve done in my life,” Hugh said afterwards. “We had to wait about half an hour below the 4,809m summit for the wind to die down. And as we got to the top, it just faded and fell away.”

The wind dropped so much that Hugh found it difficult to inflate and launch. Used to flying light on a 28m² Photon he found being fully loaded on the 23m² Ultralight 5 on loan from Ozone an unfamiliar experience.

“I popped the wing up, it looked good, turned around and ran hell for leather and the wing I thought would carry me. But it turns out I wasn’t on the Photon.”

Despite a hard bounce after prematurely sitting down, he did eventually get away. Eddie and the guide Mathieu followed shortly afterwards and the three enjoyed a 45-minute flight to the valley. “All I did was shiver the whole way down,” Hugh recalls.

Hugh, who’s been flying for nearly 30 years, first attempted to climb Mont Blanc in 2004 but was forced to turn back two hours from the summit. An uncharacteristically poor performance at last year’s British Sports Trophy in St-Jean-Montclar ultimately led to a diagnosis of Parkinson’s. He suddenly realised that it was a case of ‘now or never’ if he wanted to complete the challenge.

He prepared by running, cycling and gym-work, gave up alcohol and slept in an altitude tent (which he says made a big difference). Ultimately, it all came down to finding a weather window and when one appeared mid September he and his son dashed to Chamonix.

“It’s up there with the all-time greats” he says. “But to have done it with Eddie was beyond special for me.” For his part, Eddie, a student at Durham University, says it was a great bonding experience. “It was so much fun – even the horrible bits,” he says.

Adventure and flying runs in the family. A distant relative of the pair is the Victorian adventurer Frederick Burnaby, a swashbuckling intelligence officer who among other feats, crossed the English channel in a gas balloon in 1882 before meeting his death in hand-to-hand fighting in Sudan in 1885.

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