In 1973, at the age of 23, the late broadcaster and keen amateur pilot Sir Paul Holmes had a near-fatal accident injuring his optic nerve and causing permanent vision loss in his right eye.

Close friend, Richard Griffin recalls fondly the white-knuckle moments flying with newly licensed, amateur, one-eyed pilot Sir Paul (with just 17 hours solo behind him). “He’d got over Egmont in a whiteout and he said, “F***, I think I just missed that mountain.”

Sir Paul had lost his stereopsis since becoming monocular. “He couldn’t calculate distance from about 10 feet up. So, when you were coming in for landing, the last 10 feet were just a bit of a mystery, really. He used to drop it anywhere and sometimes it was perfect and sometimes it was hair-raising,” said Griffin in media reports.

“We had four emergency landings and took out two fences. On one occasion, we took a fence with us without crashing. I still can’t believe that. I looked out to one side and there was the top wire of a fence trailing along. Paul said, “Jesus, we’ve got to be more careful.”

Along with surviving a colourful radio and television career in the public eye, several plane, car and helicopter crashes, Sir Paul also endured several health battles. In an interview, he said “If you want to get through an experience, you’ve just got to grit your teeth and get through it.” He was knighted in 2013 two weeks before his death.