Richard Stewart holds two qualifications that rarely appear on the same CV. He is a certified commercial pilot — biplanes, freight charters, years over the Southern Alps — and a master electrician who has worked industrial mills, remote farms, and underground mines. His memoir, Run Kiwi Run, published in Queensland in March 2026, opens with the obvious question these two careers raise and spends 300-odd pages answering it.
The lesson, as Stewart frames it, is procedural. Both trades demand the same discipline: plan for the thing that goes wrong before it does, always know your alternate route, and trust the procedure over the feeling. A pilot who panics loses the aircraft. An electrician who improvises under live load loses a limb. Stewart’s memoir applies that same framework to the rest of life — the backpacking years funding aviation dreams on a tradesman’s budget, the freight runs, the remote electrical contracts, and the unnamed family crisis that forms the book’s most testing section.
Stewart grew up in New Zealand and built his career across continents before eventually settling in Queensland. He is a lifelong Salvation Army bandsman and writes from an explicitly Christian perspective — faith functions in the book as what he calls the keel of the whole enterprise. Dry Kiwi humour runs through the prose alongside it. The combination gives the memoir a tone that sits somewhere between a pilot’s briefing and a campfire story: direct, specific, and occasionally very funny about things that were not funny at all when they happened.
The family crisis section is deliberately unspecific in the submission materials — “extraordinary circumstances that threatened everything they had built.” Publisher should press Stewart for more detail before running this piece, or confirm he intends that vagueness as a structural device.
What the book offers anyone who has worked with real consequences in the physical world — trades, aviation, emergency services, medicine — is recognition. Stewart does not write about risk as metaphor. He writes about it as something with actual stakes, calculated against actual procedures, by someone who has spent a career where getting it wrong matters.
Run Kiwi Run is available now in paperback and ebook formats on Amazon and at major booksellers.
