Hong Kong-raised helicopter pilot Ben Simpson has flown creatures great and small, from baby gorillas to George W. Bush

TAKING FLIGHT I was born in Colchester, England, and we moved to Hong Kong in 1976, when I was a year old. [Simp­son’s father] secured a job with the Trade Development Council and my mother took a job at the German Swiss School, where she worked for 30 years. I was at the Peak School, and then Island School – where I did five years. I had a friend who was a para­glider pilot and one day I watched him and his dad fly up at High Island Reservoir. The second I saw that thing leave the ground, I thought, “No matter what happens in life, I’m going to do that.” Shortly afterwards, I turned 18 and my godfather, John, who was a Cathay Pacific pilot, offered to loan me the money to learn to fly. Of course I jumped at it, and started to learn out of Kai Tak, and then Shek Kong Airfield. I took to flying like a duck to water. I had a good instructor, a real no-nonsense guy. He didn’t give me any ground instruction at all, he just said, “Here’s the books, sort it out.” I landed the plane on my first lesson.

KENYA AND BUST I did cross-country flying in South Africa, sat my exams in England and got my full licence by the time I was 19. I went to Florida, America, in 1995, to get a commer­cial licence. While I was there I met a guy who’d been to Kenya and he told me how it hits the soul. “Kenya’s the place,” he said. Now I was on a mission, I wanted to be a bush pilot. At the age of 21, I landed in Nairobi with US$400. I knew nobody. I spent the first few nights in downtown Nairobi, in a proper sh*t hostel, thinking, “What am I doing here?” After a few weeks I had no cash. I called John and my mum and said I wanted to go home. They both said, “You’re staying there. You need to. It’s not going to be easy. Stick it out.”

A BEAUTIFUL BEAVER My first flights in Kenya were on the paraglider. That’s when I began to really see the country; I hadn’t been outside of Nairobi, and suddenly I was on the edge of the Rift Valley and there were wildebeests and zebra and guys with spears. I found a campsite in Nairobi for US$2 a night, and pitched my tent there for five months. I started exploring the country, looking for places to paraglide. One day, I was on a matatu – a minibus – on my way up to Mount Kenya, and as we passed Nanyuki, the airfield where I now work, I saw the most beautiful plane I’d ever seen, the de Havilland Beaver. By the time I got the driver to stop, he’d gone about 2km past it. I walked back down the road carrying this enormous bloody rucksack and went into that airfield. I was looking around the plane when the owner, Jamie Roberts, came out of the little shack. He said, “Can I help you?” I explained that I was from Hong Kong, that I was a pilot and that I was looking for a job. He looked me up and down. “Well, good for you, man,” he said. “Good luck with that.”