Around the world in record time
Faced with ever-changing travel restrictions, any teenager would be forgiven for putting plans for a roundthe-world trip on hold.
One youngster, however, took the idea one step further — she decided to fly herself.
Undeterred by a global pandemic, Belgian-British teenager Zara Rutherford set off in her one-seater Shark Ultralight plane in August last year, with her sights set on becoming the youngest woman to fly around the world solo.
After 260 hours of flying, the
19-year-old achieved her goal last night as she touched down at a small airfield in Flanders, to become the youngest woman to fly solo around the world.
Greeted by her family and wellwishers as she arrived at Belgium’s Kortrijk-Wevelgem airport, Zara wrapped herself in British and Belgian flags and told reporters: “It’s just really crazy, I haven’t quite processed it.”
The record had been previously held by American Shaesta Waiz, who was 30 at the time of her attempt in
2017.
Although there were many hairraising moments for the teenager during the 50,000km odyssey, it was the sub-zero temperatures of the Russian winter which proved the scariest.
“I’d be going hundreds and hundreds of kilometres without seeing anything human — no electricity cables, no roads, no people — and I thought ‘if the engine stopped now I’d have a really big problem’.”
When she landed in the port town of Magadan in northeastern Siberia, a local mechanic blocked up some of the air intakes on her aircraft to keep the engine warm in the extreme cold.
Despite the tweaks to the 325kg single-propeller plane, Rutherford was grounded in the town for several days, before spending another three weeks in the village of Ayan near the Sea of Okhotsk as she waited for bad weather to pass. Zara was forced to rely on the goodwill of locals for supplies, who she said were “very willing to help”.
Other dangers faced by the young pilot during her journey included an earthquake in Veracruz, Mexico, which shook the sixth-floor hotel room she was staying in, as well as tackling thunderstorms in Singapore and navigating her way through wildfire smoke in California and smog over Delhi. The route had taken her through the UK, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, the US and Latin America to Colombia, then back north via Alaska to Russia, China, Indonesia, India and the Middle East before ending in Belgium.
As well as being the youngest woman to complete the challenge, Zara has become the first woman to circumnavigate the world in a microlight, and the first Belgian to circumnavigate the world solo by air.