Supergran, 91, on a wing and a dare
A DAREDEVIL 91-year-old has become Britain’s oldest woman to wing walk.
Adrenaline junkie Norma Howard flew at 500ft above an airfield to break the world record – and says she “wasn’t frightened at all”.
But the sprightly nonagenarian admitted the hardest part of the challenge was actually getting up onto the 1940s Boeing-Stearman biplane in the first place.
Norma, who took on the challenge to raise £5,000 for Dementia UK, took the title of Britain’s oldest female wing walker from former nurse Betty Bromage, who took to the skies in 2017 when she was 88.
She carried out her wing walk at Rendcomb Airfield near Cirencester on Thursday.
Speaking yesterday, Norma said she felt “relieved and invigorated” after the textbook flight.
But the charitable pensioner insisted she did it “solely to raise money for Dementia UK” and “not for the thrills”.
Beautiful
Norma said: “I wasn’t frightened at all – it was a beautiful day and I felt a sense of immense peace looking down at the grass below.
“It was very cold up that high, though. I had so many layers on, I looked like the Michelin Man.
“By the time I got the gear on, it was so tight I couldn’t move my legs – which was actually a good thing because it was a bit wobbly.”
Norma, who lives in Fleet, Hampshire, still holds a driving licence and regularly takes elderly people living in her hometown to hospital appointments.
The mother-of-two – whose Nasa scientist husband Peter died 10 years ago – has done many things women of her age would never consider doing.
She rides on the back of her son’s Harley-Davidson when she visits him in Ohio, USA, swam the equivalent of the English Channel in a leisure centre when she was 80 and, at the age of 83, rode the Wall of Death on a 1925 motorcycle.
“That was fun,” Norma recalled. “My son lifted me on to the handlebars and away I went.”
Norma has already planned her next adventure – abseiling down Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower.
Son Robin, 64, said: “Mum’s as mad as a hatter but I’m very proud of her. She has raised a lot of money for an important cause.”
Guinness World Records confirmed the oldest ever wingwalker was the late Tom Lackey.
He was 93 when he flew over the Irish Sea in 2013.