Former Airman Bernard Rye felt his flying days were ended until workers from his Bupa care home scheduled a surprise trip for him as part of a wish-granting program.
Mr Rye, aided by his son, flew across Dorset and the Isle of Wight in a Piper PA Cherokee Six piloted by a volunteer pilot who had volunteered to fly him.
He even got the chance to fly Louis Mountbatten, the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, while he was in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
I had a genuinely good time in the RAF and got to tour everything, from South America to Australia and the Middle East, according to Mr. Rye’s own words when he was asked to sum up his time in the Royal Air Force.
He hadn’t flown in seven decades, and he never dreamed he’d be doing it again. He said, ‘I’m quite thankful to the crew for making it happen. It brought me a long way back in time.’
All of the group’s care facilities are putting the program into practice to inspire people to live life to the fullest while also crossing things off their bucket list.
Being in a care facility shouldn’t prevent someone from achieving their objectives and dreams, according to Ms. McCarthy.
We all like hearing Bernard’s stories about his time serving in the RAF, and he enjoys sharing them much. We therefore organized a surprise for him in order to let him relive the experience.
To prepare the surprise, she worked closely with fly2help, a nonprofit that specialized in aviation activities.
Although he was an accountant by trade, he also worked as a pilot and navigator, both of which required him to calculate flight trajectories under extremely challenging conditions.
After the war, Mr. Rye left the RAF and went back to work as an accountant for a manufacturing company.
He first met the person who would become his wife here in 1955. After a brief courtship, they were wed a year later in a London wedding at All Saints Church, Woodford Green.
After being married, the couple moved to Poole, Dorset, where Bernard started working as a finance manager for a local business.
Since then, he has stayed in the area, eventually moving to the nursing home in 2013.