From Bishops to biplanes: A Cape Town boy is strapping himself to a wing for rhinos
Bishops old boy Luc Janssens will strap himself to the top wing of a 1940s biplane to raise money for orphaned rhinos in South Africa.
Luc Janssens grew up in Cape Town and went to Bishops. Now he lives in London.
On Thursday, 23 July he’ll be strapped to the top wing of a 1940s biplane, flying at 120mph (193km/h), to raise money for orphaned rhinos back home.
Why a former Bishops boy is doing a wing walk
Janssens is a Director at Mercantile Accounting in London, working with founders and small businesses. He’s also deep in the South African community here.
He sits on the Young Professionals Committee of the South African Chamber of Commerce, and he’s a trustee and treasurer of GAGA UK, which funds education projects in Southern Africa.
Away from the office he’s an endurance athlete. So a physical challenge suits him. But this one is unusual, even by his standards.
The wing walk came about almost by accident.
A stranger approached him in an outdoor shop in Wales and asked if he’d be willing to be strapped to the outside of an aeroplane for charity.
His answer was immediate. “Sign me up.”
He describes the whole thing, cheerfully, as “something a bit ridiculous”. That’s rather the point.
What a wing walk actually involves
A wing walk means being harnessed to a frame above the top wing of a biplane while it performs a full routine in the air. It’s one of the more extreme fundraising challenges going in the UK.
The flight is run by AeroSuperBatics, the world’s only formation wing-walking team, out of RFC Rendcomb near Cirencester. The airfield started life as a Royal Flying Corps training base in the First World War. AeroSuperBatics has been flying since 1984, holds Guinness World Records, and has a 100% safety record built over four decades.
The aircraft themselves are restored 1940s Boeing Stearman biplanes in orange and black, re-engined to carry a person standing on the wing. On the day, Janssens will go through fly-pasts, zoom climbs, steep dives and banking turns at up to 120mph.
Care for Wild, the sanctuary he’s flying for
Every rand and pound raised goes to Care for Wild, the largest orphan-rhino sanctuary in the world. Founded in 2011 by Petronel Nieuwoudt, it sits inside the greater Barberton Nature Reserve in Mpumalanga. Its exact location is kept confidential for security reasons.
The sanctuary rescues, rehabilitates and releases rhino calves left behind when their mothers are poached, many of them from neighbouring Kruger National Park. It has cared for more than 100 rhinos so far, over 20 of them admitted with serious injuries. The youngest calves are bottle-fed round the clock, taking up to 16 litres of milk a day.
Protection is serious business. There’s a mounted horse unit, a K9 unit and AI-enabled tracking technology, and the main sanctuary has now gone thousands of consecutive days without a poaching incursion.
The numbers behind the wing walk
The urgency is real, and it’s close to home. In 2025, 352 rhinos were poached in South Africa. That’s actually a 16% drop on the 420 killed in 2024, but it still works out to roughly one rhino killed every 15 hours across the continent.
Mpumalanga, the very province Care for Wild calls home, was hit hardest of all last year, losing 178 rhinos, nearly double the year before. Poaching in the adjacent Kruger National Park almost doubled too. More than 12 000 rhinos have been lost across Africa since the current crisis began in 2008.
A South African in London, giving back to home
There’s something familiar in this story to anyone who’s left South Africa and built a life elsewhere. Janssens is thousands of miles from home, doing something frightening and public, for a cause under real pressure in the province he grew up near. It’s the same instinct that keeps so many of us in the diaspora looking for ways to stay useful to home, even from London.
Donations pay for exactly what you’d hope: vet care and milk for orphaned calves, round-the-clock anti-poaching protection, and the community and education programmes that give people alternatives to poaching in the first place.
How to support the wing walk
You can donate on Luc’s JustGiving page: https://www.justgiving.com/page/antonio-care-for-wild
If you’re a UK taxpayer, add Gift Aid. The charity claims an extra 25% at no cost to you, so a £100 donation becomes £125. Company donations can usually be claimed as an allowable expense too.
Got a story about a South African abroad taking on something a bit mad for a good cause back home? Get in touch at [email protected].