Downed pilot still soaring
Volume 11, No. 55, November 02, 2006
By Cpl Mike McSweeney

Impact: The crashed ultralight .

Back flying: Maj Glenn Todhunter with a Super King Air from 173 Survl Sqn.

STRANGE BUT TRUE While recovering in hospital, Maj Todhunter read the book Reach for the Sky by Sir Douglas Bader, the famous World War II RAF fighter pilot who continued to fly after losing his legs in an aircraft accident in 1931. Maj Todhunter said the similarities were uncanny. Photographs from the two crash sites were almost identical. They both had a shoe thrown clear, and at both sites it is near the front of the aircraft..

BLACK Hawk pilot Maj Glenn Todhunter had managed to drag himself free from the ultralight plane wreckage. With a crushed vertebra and bleeding from a severed artery in his mangled legs, he was determined the accident would not impede his flying.

“I made my mind up lying there that I wasn’t going to let this stop me from doing what I love,” Maj Todhunter said.

True to that vow, he returned to flying and became the first double amputee to fly in the ADF.

The logbook has closed on his remarkable career in the ARA as he retired from full-time service in May and has transferred to the Army Reserve.

“Army has been an exceptional equal opportunity employer, and I’m an example of how Army does look after its people,” he said.

At 17, Maj Todhunter was flying before he could drive a car. Graduating from RMC-D in 1990, he flew Black Hawks in Cambodia and was a troop commander in B Sqn, 5 Avn Regt, by 1995.

“At that time they weren’t sure whether they were going to send me on an instructor course or put me in the line for squadron command,” he said.

On leave in 1995, Maj Todhunter went flying with a local ultralight club.

“I was doing an instructor rating as I’d been asked to be a voluntary instructor for the club,” he said.

“We were practising a procedure called engine failure after take off. And a practice emergency turned into a real emergency and we crashed from about 200ft. It almost killed both of us.

“To this day my colleague and I believe we flew into wind sheer, which is a rapid change of wind direction and speed.”

His colleague, Jeff Britten – who had suffered a broken arm and smashed foot – managed to drag himself across the vacant airfield to a telephone. Maj Toddhunter lay in the paddock for three-and-half hours before a diverted rescue helicopter arrived with a doctor and two nurses aboard.

“I lost an enormous amount of blood and the surgeon at the hospital said to me ‘if you had been 20 minutes later getting in to see me you would have been dead and, as it was, we almost lost you on the table’.”

When he awoke in hospital Maj Todhunter found both his legs had been amputated just below the knee.

“Straightaway I had all sorts of people saying ‘well, that’s it for your flying, mate’,” he said.

“I wasn’t prepared to accept the advice of strangers for what I was and wasn’t capable of.

“Flying has been something that I loved since I was a kid. I grew up around aeroplanes and I’d worked very hard to get the career that I had.”

With his wife, Michelle, by his side and the help of senior aviation medicine specialists, Maj Todhunter was determined to fly again.

“All I asked for was the opportunity to demonstrate whether it could be done safely,” he said.

“It had not been done before so you can understand there was initial resistance and a bit of trepidation. In retrospect I don’t blame them for it.”

As he battled people’s prejudice, he learnt to walk again, requalified for his driver’s licence using his prosthetic legs and attempted to regain his civilian pilot’s licence.

“I had to be assessed to get my civil pilot’s medical [certification] back so I did a cockpit assessment with a senior instructor from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority,” he said.

The civilian instructor was tough on him, but after 18 months of hard slog he was finally back in the cockpit and qualified to fly again.

The next two-year hurdle was to get back to military flying.

“My corps sponsored the doctors’ very scientific approach to assessing my prosthetic legs’ suitability to the cockpit ergonomic environment. So I did a range of rigorous ground and flight assessments on every aircraft type Army Aviation operated except the Chinook,” he said.

More than three years after he almost lost his life, Maj Todhunter returned to full-time flying with the ADF. He was OPSO at the School of Army Aviation when he once again flew his beloved Black Hawks and eventually changed to King Air fixed-wing aircraft. He flew overseas during several operations, including shuttling Gen Cosgrove back from Timor.

Maj Todhunter recently left the ARA and in addition to civilian flying and public speaking, he will serve as a reservist with HQ 16 Bde (Avn).

“I think that everyone is capable of achieving extraordinary results in whatever they set out to do in their lives,” he said.

“People should never be dissuaded in pursuit of their goals by what anybody else thinks or says.”