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SPINAL NETWORK NEWS 9<br />
HAPPY PLACE—Sir Tim Wallis and friends at Big Bay, South Westland, enroute to Wanaka after a fishing trip to Fiordland in his Hughes 500D, registered HOT.<br />
Barry Cardno, paraplegic pilot<br />
Easter 1995, at a Hamilton Airshow I saw Tim who I<br />
knew was a partial paraplegic (from a helicopter crash<br />
in 1968) and legendary aviator, standing by his historic<br />
Mk XVI Spitfire.<br />
I wandered over to introduce myself. This proved ironic,<br />
as about two weeks later I crashed my Fletcher<br />
topdressing plane, broke my back, and have lived with<br />
paraplegia ever since.<br />
Sir Tim, or just Tim as he preferred to be called, and a pilot<br />
uncle had been idols of mine as a kid in Wanaka in the 1970s.<br />
Although we moved away before I started school, Wanaka<br />
remained a place of frequent holidays, sometimes staying<br />
with my relatives. Across the paddock from their place<br />
lived Tim and Prue Wallis and their four boys. Tim had a<br />
hangar at home, and I can remember seeing Tim land his<br />
Hughes 500D helicopter, registered Hotel-Oscar-Tango<br />
(HOT), running across the paddock with a cousin to get a<br />
closer look.<br />
Such was the impression these men made on me, in 1991<br />
I left school early to get a job to fund flight training.<br />
Fully licenced in 1992, one time in 1993 I landed a friend’s<br />
vintage Auster on the beach at Big Bay, South Westland.<br />
With me was a cousin from yesteryear in Wanaka. Peering to<br />
the south we could hear then see a fast-flying Hughes 500D<br />
approach at low level, buzz us and land in the scrub just<br />
beyond the beach. Seeing its registration, HOT, we knew<br />
immediately it was Tim Wallis, and much like years earlier<br />
in Wanaka, we sprinted up for a closer look and to say hi.<br />
In 1994 I obtained a Commercial Pilot Licence and began<br />
work as a topdressing pilot. Alas, I would crash the<br />
following year and bust my back.<br />
Sir Tim had been an<br />
idol of mine as a kid in<br />
Wanaka in the 1970s.<br />
—Barry Cardno<br />
When at the Burwood Spinal Unit, one day I got a letter<br />
from Tim. I was excited and couldn’t believe this<br />
larger-than-life character had taken the time to write to<br />
me. Later, he would tell me he remembered meeting me at<br />
the Hamilton Airshow. He wrote ‘Sorry to hear that you<br />
had a bad crash a few weeks ago… I hope you are getting<br />
some feeling and movement back in your legs… It took<br />
over a month before I could wiggle one toe. Luckily I<br />
improved enough to build on strengthening what I had<br />
left in order to lead the relatively active life I now lead—<br />
and of course go back to flying.’ He said that he’d call in<br />
when he was next in Christchurch.<br />
Which he did, but that day I was out of the Spinal Unit for<br />
the first time. He left a note on my bed, and would write<br />
again. One letter, this self-styled ‘relatively active’ man<br />
had just returned from a two-month trip abroad and was<br />
now heading to Korea and Russia. He invited me to visit<br />
him when I got out of Burwood. I did.<br />
But on 2 January 1996, Tim crashed his Mk XIV Spitfire on<br />
take-off at Wanaka Airport and suffered a severe brain<br />
injury which would ground him for life and end the<br />
hurricane-like pace he lived. In 1998 and 1999 I worked<br />
alongside Tim to archive his photographic collection.
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