James Pitman

James, a 40 year old lawyer, recently turned his back on his legal career to join Mike Blyth in the development of a light sport aircraft in Germiston, Johannesburg. James grew up on a farm in the Kwa-Zulu Natal midlands of South Africa, where he claims to have acquired most of his practical knowledge. Living under the shadow of the Drakensberg Mountains, he developed a deep love of adventure and the outdoors at a young age. Notwithstanding his reservations about the benefits of hard work, during his school and university years he achieved moderate success both in academia and on the sporting fields. Having completed BSc and Llb degrees at the University of Cape Town, he spent 7 months driving a 30 year old Bedford truck from Cape Town to London with a group of 5 friends. The adventure is recounted in the novel "Malachite – A Journey through Africa" (Paul Marketos, Minerva Press, 1998). Thereafter James knuckled down to 6 years of graft as a young attorney, practising in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. During 2000, and as the result of too strong a diet of anarchist literature, he left his job to travel alone in India for 8 months, attempting to ride an Enfield motorcycle from Kathmandu back home to Cape Town. (He made it to Cairo, but was stumped by financial, logistic and motivational difficulties at the Sudanese border).

Having returned to Johannesburg with the realisation that choosing the hippie life would not cause history to reverse its direction, James again entered the world of commercial law. This time, thanks to a fine and unusual group of colleagues, he was able to mix his legal practise with a steady dose of rock climbing, thereby staving off the decline into middle age more successfully than many of his peers. During the period 2003 to 2006 he climbed extensively, travelling to the USA to tackle the great ‘el Kapitan’ in Yosemite, California, and thereafter to Pakistan to climb the mighty Trango Tower, situated high in the Karakoram mountain range.

During 2007 a brief, lucrative and luck-filled career change into the uranium exploration industry gave James the freedom to pursue an abiding interest in flying which he has enjoyed since his childhood. James now has a 20 month daughter and a son due in late November 2008. He is busy researching the appropriate balance between work and play.