The Sky's No Limit

Ross Willmot is Executive Director of the Ontario Association for
Continuing Education.

This sky adventurer’s autobiography is that of one who chose to be a participant rather than a spectator of life. Taking as his models early bush pilots, young Munro ran away from unloving parents to start his own flying career as an untrained parachutist in an air show. He went on to collect 61 aviation records and membership in the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame.

Munro’s is a well-told story befitting that of a newspaperman who received 30 national and international awards. He survived many crashes in aircraft, cars, and balloons, as well as attacks by criminals who tried to stop him from exposing them. He holds nothing back about his own mistakes as well as those of others in telling about his continuing search for adventure. He claims life is the second greatest adventure, death the first.

Invalided out of the RCAF as a fighter pilot in 1942, Munro became a crusading reporter and photographer with the Toronto Star Vancouver Sun and Tribune and Editor of the Chatham Daily News. During this period he accomplished many rescue missions as a bush pilot. As Expo ‘67 Polar Ambassador, he honored early bush fliers with his 12,000-mile flight through the high Arctic. As a balloonist he made the first successful balloon crossing of the Irish Sea, and as a high-altitude parachutist he became the first to parachute onto the area of the North Pole.

To keep his second marriage intact, Munro in vain divested himself of his airborne activities. Now, without a family, he has forgiven his father for his legacy of rootlessness.