Flying High… Flying Low
A tale of the ups and downs of life, the successes and bitter disappointments, even despair and disbelief. Tom Ballantyne’s story is about the quirks of fate, the twists and turns that change the course of a career and, at its core, a love story.
Flying High… and Low is the story of a sixty-year career in the media that has taken Scots-born, multi-award-winning Australian journalist Tom Ballantyne to the four corners of the globe. Starting as a mere copy boy for the Scottish Daily Mail, Ballantyne has gone on to report on the minutiae of life, from crime and politics to natural disasters and guerilla conflicts in Africa. He spent 18 years with the Sydney Morning Herald and, for more than thirty years, has reported on one of the world’s most volatile and exciting industries – the airline business.
Through his turbulent and adventurous career, one thing has remained constant – the love shared with his wife of over fifty years and how, during the lowest of times, chance can bring two people together to forge a lifetime bond in marriage.
Author Bio
Scottish-born Australian Tom Ballantyne, Associate Editor and Chief Correspondent of the Hong Kong-published Orient Aviation magazine has more than 60 years of experience in international journalism. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1947 he began his career in the 1960s with the Scottish Daily Mail newspaper in Edinburgh, working for several other Scottish publications before moving overseas in 1969 to report on events in Australia and later Southern Africa. During the early 1970s, Tom was a war correspondent for South Africa’s Argus newspaper group, covering conflicts in the then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), as well as the Portuguese territories of Angola and Mozambique. He returned to Australia in 1975 to begin an 18-year stint with that country’s premier newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, covering a wide range of issues from industrial relations and crime to politics, defence, and feature writing. After spending three years as the Herald’s Chief of Staff, he was appointed Travel and Aviation Editor in 1989. During this period he authored Breakfast in Bali, Supper at the Savoy, a humorous travel tale, as well as co-authoring a second book, A Year of Good Weekends and co-authoring another humorous travel book, Passengers Who Make Your Flight Hell!: The Lighter Side of Flying.
Building a growing reputation as a specialist writer on the international aviation and airline industry, he left the Herald in 1995, working as Asia Correspondent for the London-based Airline Business magazine before being appointed Chief Correspondent of Orient Aviation. As well as writing, he has been a regular commentator on aviation issues on television and radio in Australia, Asia, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom. He has regularly commented on international aviation affairs for BBC World, Al Jazeera and CNN. Tom has also been a speaker at numerous aviation conferences and seminars.
Now based on the New South Wales Central Coast an hour north of Sydney, Australia, he won the prestigious GE Aircraft Engines Award for the Best Air Transport Submission at the Royal Aerospace Society’s Journalist of the Year Awards in London in 1998. In 2000 he was a double winner in the Australian National Aviation Press Club annual awards, named the country’s Aviation Writer of the Year as well as author of the Best Aviation Feature Story of the Year. He has won the latter award five more times.
At a special function during the Singapore Air Show in February 2020 he was presented with The Lifetime Achievement Award by Aerospace Media Awards-Asia and in 2023 given a Decade of Excellence award by the Australasian National Aviation Press Club.
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