Hearing-impaired pilot carries message of hope round the world

When Johan Hammarström was growing up in Sweden, he didn't like to wear his hearing aids. He would often hide them under his desk in school even though he had a congenital 65-dB bilateral hearing loss. Now 28, he explained that as a boy and even as a college student, he cared more about seeming “normal” than hearing well. Like many people who become hearing-impaired early in life, he became adept at reading lips and even better at fooling people into thinking that he could hear them. In school, he said, if he couldn't hear the teacher, he would make up for what he missed by doing extra reading. His attitude changed, Hammarström said, when he went out into the workplace. There, he couldn't fake it. If he couldn't hear, he couldn't do his job—or keep it. He realized that he had to admit that he had a hearing problem and deal with it openly with hearing aids and other resources.Figure: The world travelers posed with their plane at Bangor Airport. From left are Martin Håkansson, Henrik Ejderholm, and Johan Hammarström.Finally acknowledging his disability gave him a great sense of relief, he said. It also surprised many of his friends and classmates, who told him they had had no idea of the seriousness of his hearing loss.Figure: The captain of World Flight for Hearing received a warm welcome at this center for hard-of-hearing and deaf children in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.Thus far, Johan'S story is a familiar one to any hearing professional. Patients of all ages, but especially children and adolescents who fear ridicule and rejection by their peers, often try to conceal their hearing loss and what they see as its most obvious indicator—hearing aids. It'S often not until they reach adulthood that they quit hiding their disability. However, what makes Hammarström so unusual is that not only did he admit his hearing loss to the world, but he made it his mission to teach and persuade other young people with a hearing loss not to make the same mistakes he had made, but instead to acknowledge their problem and tackle it head on. What'S more, he decided that the best way to get that message across was to show young people, through personal example, that if they have the right attitude and the right hearing care technology, they can do whatever they want—despite their hearing impairment. And, he conceived of the World Flight for Hearing as the way to send that message. HOW THE FLIGHT CAME TO BE For Hammarström, it was only natural to turn to flying to prove that hearing loss need not limit one'S goals. His father, a university professor, is an amateur pilot, and Johan became excited about aviation even before he entered school. Although he learned to fly at a young age, when it came to being licensed as a commercial pilot he faced severe obstacles that would have caused a less determined person to abandon the dream. Under Sweden'S regulations, Hammarström'S hearing, even aided, clearly fell short of the standards required to obtain a commercial license. However, he refused to give up. After an 18-month battle and with help from an audiologist who created a simulation of the auditory conditions in the cockpit, he was able to prove to the government authorities that his hearing was sufficient for communicating with an airport control tower and for all the other tasks required to pilot a plane safely.Figure: Soaring over the “blue hole,” a several-hundred-meter-deep body of water within the reefs of Belize.Having won the right to fly, Hammarström decided that the most dramatic way to persuade others not to let hearing loss keep them down was through what he called the World Flight for Hearing (WFH). The flight would be the first time that a hearing-impaired person had piloted a light aircraft around the world. This was an audacious dream for a young man without the extensive resources such an undertaking would require. However, he did have advantages. Along with being a skilled pilot, he worked for a Swedish medical technology company, Sectra, whose owner is a pilot and who encouraged his young employee to pursue his goal. He also had two friends and co-workers at Sectra, Martin Håkansson, now 28, and Henrik Ejderholm, 34, who were expert pilots who loved the idea of flying with him. However, that was only a beginning.Figure: Airborne.Starting in May 2004, when the WFH launched its web site (www.worldflightforhearing.com), Hammarström began in earnest to publicize and build support for his flight. He spoke to hard-of-hearing groups around Scandinavia, visited schools for the deaf, gave numerous interviews with the press, and attended events such as the International Federation of Hard of Hearing People (IFHOH) International Congress. And everywhere he went, he delivered the message that people with hearing loss can achieve whatever they want. Over time, IFHOH and more than 25 other non-profit organizations became WFH partners. GN ReSOUND SIGNS ON Above all, Hammarström needed financial sponsorship. Given the message he wanted to take around the world, a hearing aid manufacturer seemed the logical choice. Several were interested, he said, but GN ReSound AS of Taastrup, Denmark, proved the best fit. In July 2005, that company, whose Metrix hearing aids Hammarström wears and swears by, became the principal sponsor of WFH. GN ReSound said that sponsoring WFH “helps Johan Hammarström and his team complete a project that aims to create positive publicity for the use of hearing aids and hearing in general.”Figure: The hearing-impaired children of parents in the Canadian organization Voice for Life piled into the cockpit of World Flyer with Johan as Martin gave them a hand. The picture was taken during a stop in Toronto.READY FOR TAKE-OFF While GN was the primary sponsor, Hammarström also rounded up more than 30 co-sponsors. Of these, none was more important than Diamond, the company that built the lightweight, four-seat aircraft used for the voyage. For the manufacturer, the flight was an opportunity to showcase the DA42 Twin Star, about which it said, “With its needle nose and wasp waist is among the most dramatic new entries to the general aviation market.” The glass and carbon aircraft, which weighs not much more than a ton when empty, was selected in part because of its fuel milage. With an extra (third) fuel tank installed, it can go 2000 miles or more without refueling. The propellor plane is powered by a pair of the same four-cylinder, 1.7-liter turbo-diesels used in certain Mercedes-Benz automobiles.Figure. I: 've got a hearing loss just like you was the message that Johan delivered to kids at a school in Brisbane, Australia. He went on to tell them how he had fought successfully to overcome his disability and achieve his dreams.On March 15, 2006, after nearly 2 years in the planning, the World Flyer, as Hammarström named the plane, took off from Stockholm on the World Flight for Hearing. It was to last more than 5 months and cover more than 30,000 miles in circumnavigating the globe from west to east. A MEETING IN MAINE On August 4, during WFH'S one-day stop in Bangor, ME, The Hearing Journal caught up with Hammarström and his crew. As the three young Swedes climbed out of the clear glass cockpit onto a wing then jumped down onto the tarmac, they appeared none the worse for wear from their long voyage, much of it spent in close quarters. Looking boyishly clean-shaven and well-rested and wearing crisp white t-shirts covered with sponsors' logos—part of the very limited wardrobe that fit into each one'S duffel bag—the crew could, from all appearances, have been on the first rather than the 144th day of their voyage. Despite having just flown in a few hundred miles from London, ON, Johan invited me to join him and Martin for a half-hour spin 2000 feet above the dark pine woods and glistening blue lakes of northern Maine. And, he let a total novice take over the co-pilot'S controls for 10 minutes—just long enough to make me understand the thrill of flying. During the drive to Castine, a village on the Maine coast, and over a lobster dinner on the dock, Johan, Henrik, and Martin told my wife, Annie, and me about their flight. Although it was certainly a great adventure, it was clearly far more than that to Johan and to his normal-hearing mates. Johan, whose fluent English betrays no sign of his hearing loss, said that there was nothing more rewarding than to walk into a hall full of children in a school for the deaf—which he did in countries all over the world—and watch how excited they were to see him, a deaf person who was flying a plane around the world. At every opportunity, he exhorted his young audiences, “Have your own dreams.” Martin and Henrik said that their travels with Johan had given them a better understanding of the challenges of hearing loss and the importance of de-stigmatizing it and spreading the word that people can accomplish great things in life despite hearing impairment. Hearing the trio'S account of their travels made it clear that WFH had succeeded in its goal of drawing attention to hearing loss and to how modern technology and the right attitude can overcome it. In many of the 40 countries where their plane touched down, the flight was big news. Hammarström gave scores of newspaper, radio, and television interviews from Greece to Israel to Australia to Iceland and dozens of places in between. Probably the most extensive exposure came in India, where a GN ReSound distributor in Mumbai arranged for the pilots to meet with a hard-of-hearing group. Their appearance drew coverage of the flight from India'S three largest television channels and two major newspapers, reaching an audience of hundreds of millions. But, wherever they went, the threesome said they enjoyed warm hospitality from their hosts. The scariest moment of the trip, Johan and Martin said, was their arrival in Christmas Island in the Pacific. Although they had radioed ahead, when they approached the tiny island at night with their fuel low after a 12-hour flight from Western Samoa, there were no lights on at the runway. Fortunately, the noise of their plane eventually caught the attention of the airport controller, who emerged from his house wearing only a sarong, drove to the airstrip, and turned on the lights. Disaster was averted. While they flew a lot, more days than not the travelers spent on the ground. Among the highlights the Swedes told about were swimming in the Dead Sea, trekking in Nepal, making friends with fellow enthusiasts in the Thai Flying Club, touring a national park in Australia, diving off the coast of Belize, and taking part in the world-famous Oshkosh (WI) Flying Show. Although they had been traveling for nearly 5 months when they stopped in Maine, Johan, Martin, and Henrik all said they wished they could continue their flight for many more months. TRIUMPHANT RETURN On August 19, 2 weeks after lifting off from Bangor, WFH arrived safely in Stockholm. Here'S how Johan described it on the expedition'S blog: “We did it, we did it, we did it! What a wonderful feeling to cross the goal line in Stockholm and open up the canopy and hear the cheering from more than 100 people welcoming us with big signs! With six hands on the scissors, the WFH team cut the goal stripe together and marched into the arms of our cheering friends, relatives, and partners in the project. What a feeling!!!”

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