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Every once in a while on Constructive Conversations, we step away from construction finance and talk about life — and how to live it better. This was one of those episodes. My guest was Ryan Campbell, an Australian now based in Nashville, Tennessee, whom I first saw as a keynote speaker at the CFMA National Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, around the first of June. Ryan made history as the youngest pilot to fly solo around the world, and I wanted our listeners to hear that story straight from him.
Ryan came from what he calls a normal Aussie family, and he fell in love with flight at six years old. From that point on, all he wanted to do was learn to fly an airplane. He worked after-school jobs and weekend jobs to pay for flight lessons, soloed an airplane at fifteen, was flying his friends at sixteen, held a private pilot's license at seventeen, and a commercial pilot's license at eighteen. Very driven, very directed by everything to do with flight.
At seventeen, his interest in the pioneering aviators — the ones who crossed the oceans, broke the records, and achieved all those aviation firsts back in the day — collided with his love of flying and produced an idea: do something that had never been done before in the world of flight. In the modern day, there aren't many of those things left. Flying a single-engine airplane solo around the world, breaking the age record for the youngest person to do it, and becoming the first teenager in history to do it — that was the path he chose.
Like any modern-day budding adventurous teenager, he Googled how to fly solo around the world. He found a website, learned a little about what it took, and realized more people had been to space than had flown solo around the world. He gathered support from some famous Australian household names — the only problem being that his parents didn't know yet. So he asked his mum and dad, got their support, and began two years of planning, training, preparing, and fundraising. His family built a team, he expanded his skills as a pilot, and they fundraised a quarter of a million dollars on a laptop computer. They modified a little single-engine airplane they had fought to get in the first place. Ryan told me they're just as proud of those two years of getting to the start line as they are of the flight itself.
At nineteen, he said goodbye to his family and the ever-growing group of people following the trip, hopped into that single-engine airplane with 160 gallons of fuel inside the cockpit with him, and took off from an airport just south of Sydney. The journey covered 24,000 nautical miles, 35 stops, and 15 countries. He crossed the Pacific, crossed the States, crossed the North Atlantic, went through Europe, down into Greece, had an issue in Egypt, ended up in Jordan, then across Saudi Arabia to Oman, then Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, the west coast of Australia, and finally across his own country. He summed it up as an expedition that held every emotion a good expedition should: boredom, sheer terror, pleasure, immense regret — a bit of everything.
At nineteen, it all came to a successful end. The records were broken, but Ryan told me that ultimately wasn't what mattered. What mattered was the team they built, the joy people pulled from the adventure, and the impact they had afterward getting young kids interested in flying and giving something positive back to others. The adventure led to a lot of cool opportunities — writing a book, Born to Fly, and meeting wonderful people. He shook the hand of a man who walked on the moon and had a conversation with Prince William. As Ryan put it, he was a normal Aussie kid living a really abnormal life.
But that incredible high was only half the story. Ryan speaks for a living now, delivering keynotes all around the US and the world, and he told me he always struggles to tell this next part. He thinks he's delivered only two keynotes ever where he didn't struggle with it.
At twenty, he wrote and released his book and was living an honestly incredible life. He was offered a job flying for Qantas — the airline he had dreamed of flying for since he was six years old — and he turned it down. He didn't want to go drive the bus at twenty; he wanted to fly old airplanes, build experience, and keep living an adventurous life for a while before ending up in the airlines. That decision led to an opportunity to fly a vintage biplane built in the 1930s — open cockpit, Ryan sitting in the back, one passenger in the front. They'd fly up and down the beach on adventure flights, going upside down if the passenger wanted. A tremendous job, a beautiful airplane, and a wonderful part of the world.
Then, on a normal day at work, on takeoff, they lost power. An engine failure, low level. Despite doing everything he could in the next few seconds, what resulted was a really horrific plane crash. Ryan was cut from the wreckage and flown to the hospital as the only survivor. The kid who wrote a book called Born to Fly was suddenly front-page news for the worst possible reason, and, in his words, at rock bottom as much as he could ever imagine rock bottom to be.
He was broken from head to toe: five breaks in his back, facial bones, his right ankle — broken, busted, cut, or bruised, as he put it. His body shut down and doctors revived him and took him to ICU. He suffered a burst fracture at L1 and a spinal cord injury, and he was diagnosed as a complete paraplegic. He spent six months in hospital and a year and a half in rehabilitation, and he still lives with a lifelong disability that has changed the way he lives his life. And yet Ryan says that in all of that mess, he was a lucky one. He thankfully got back to walking and even back to flying, though he can't fly all airplanes and the airline pilot dream is no longer a reality. He retrained as a helicopter pilot as an incomplete paraplegic, but struggled to find the reliability in his body that being a commercial helicopter pilot would require.
One thing Ryan shared from his time in the spinal rehabilitation ward has stuck with me. He spent six months in a dedicated ward for quadriplegics and paraplegics, doing fourteen sessions per week on physical health and just one session per week on mental health. In a world where, as he says, life is won and lost above your shoulders, he calls that an unacceptable imbalance — and it's still in the system today. He watched quadriplegics, with no chance of recovery for the rest of their lives, wheel out of that hospital with better mindsets and better outlooks than incomplete paraplegics who, as he put it, won the spinal cord injury lottery of life and walked out of the ward. That proved something to him: the battle we all fight above our shoulders is where life is won and lost, and it's not necessarily the things we think will help us — like walking, in that scenario — that make the difference.
At nineteen, the high. At twenty-one, the low. A rough, polar opposite set of experiences — and, as you'll read in the next post, the comparison between the two is where the lessons he now shares with audiences everywhere were born.
