When Norman Surplus was diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer at 40, it was “a body blow”. The prognosis gave him only a 40 per cent chance of lasting for 18 months.
He still gets emotional when he describes the “mental challenge” he faced 12 years ago, knowing that the odds were that very soon he would be leaving his young family behind.
One day, when recovering from surgery, he saw a reality TV show involving the restoration of an old autogyro that had been sitting for decades at the back of a barn. “I thought to myself: ‘If I get out of this mess, that’s something I’d like to try.’” Suddenly, he had a goal to reach.
Staying positiveThe goal helped him stay positive through surgeries and particularly aggressive bouts of chemotherapy. When, against the odds, he was finally up and about again, he duly got his license at the only school that then offered training — in the U.K. He flew his autogyro home from Northumbria to Northern Ireland, across the Irish Sea, and started thinking about how far he could take it.
After some research, he realised with delight that despite a few recent attempts, no one had yet flown an autogyro around the world. “To find an aviation record that’s not been set is very rare,” he said. He decided to try, and after four years, he’s still going.
In 2010 he set off from Belfast, and over the next year he flew through 18 countries in Europe, the Middle East and east over Asia to reach Japan. Then he fell foul of the worsening geopolitical situation between Russia and the rest of the world.
For three Kafkaesque years, the gyro was in mothballs in Japan. Mr. Surplus looked into other routes through the Japanese islands and the Aleutians, or the South Pacific, but the craft just didn’t have quite enough range.
Finally he couldn’t delay any further. “It’s difficult to keep an aircraft legally registered and active when it’s stuck in one place,” he said. He shipped the autogyro to Tacoma, Washington, and it wintered at the Evergreen Air and Space Museum in McMinville, about an hour south-west of Portland.
Island-hoppingNow he’ll track across the U.S., and spend the summer island-hopping across the north Atlantic, from northern Canada, to Greenland, then Iceland and the outer Hebrides, and back to Belfast. This in itself will be a record: “No autogyro has ever flown across the Atlantic.” Mr. Surplus thinks its time might be coming again. In an energy-conscious age, its efficiency is attractive — it only uses a third of the aviation fuel of a helicopter of similar size.
There’s no big ground or support crew, and never a guarantee that he won’t be ensnared by red tape or worse as he flits from country to country. But he’s determined, raising funds for bowel cancer along the way: “I love an underdog, and the autogyro is the ultimate underdog of aviation.” With Mr. Surplus at the controls of his small yellow gyrocopter, two underdogs are having their day. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
