The solo pilot who flew into an online storm
Pilot Tracey Curtis-Taylor tells Cara McGoogan how having an aviation prize ripped from her grasp sent her into a spin
Pointing to a photo of her 1941 Ryan Recruit, the prototype of a trainer aircraft from the Second World War, aviator Tracey Curtis-Taylor is grim-faced. “I’ll be removing that aircraft from the British register because of the way I’ve been treated,” she fumes. “I’m washing my hands and walking away.”
The self-styled “Bird in a Biplane” has been the subject of contention among Britain’s Light Aircraft Association (LAA), which last weekend stripped her for good of a 2014 award she received after an expedition from Cape Town to Goodwood in a vintage carrier.
Curtis-Taylor, 56, claims to be the victim of bitter and misogynistic trolls who waged an aggressive campaign to undermine her. Those opposing her say she lied about flying the eight-week journey – that covered 7,150miles (11,500km) and took five years of preparation – solo and deserved to forfeit the prize.
“This is one of the last bastions of total male dominance,” she tells me from the living room of her southwest London home, filled with flying memorabilia. “It’s a culture that was created by the military after the First World War and of which there are remnants today.”
We meet the morning after Curtis-Taylor lost a two-year fight to convince LAA members that she should retain the Bill Woodhams Trophy for a feat in navigation and, while she is visibly exasperated by its verdict, she maintains the tenacity that has propelled her career.
“You don’t fly a vintage biplane across five continents and not have a bit of determination,” she says, launching into an anecdote about how last summer she returned to America to repeat a flight that had ended in a crash in 2016 when her engine failed over the Arizona desert.
With dark wispy hair and dressed all in black, Curtis-Taylor speaks with an accent that blends her English, Canadian and New Zealand roots. On a top shelf in the living room there is a long wooden propeller from her first plane, a First World War aircraft “known for doing dog fights with the Red Baron”. Beneath is an over-sized version of the Flying Lady, better known as the Rolls-Royce mascot.
Curtis-Taylor’s battlefield has changed somewhat of late. Gone are the challenges of the elements at tens of thousands of feet; now, the fight is with vicious online trolls.
“The pioneers were certainly up against huge discrimination and prejudice but, by God, social media is a modern phenomenon,” she says.
Since 2015, she says she has felt under attack, bullied and discriminated against by a group of former associates and strangers. She claims they have bombarded her with sexist jibes and a “misrepresentation of the narrative of my life”, going as far, on one occasion, as to publish her address online, and to send one of her supporters a death threat.
A mid-flight crash has been nothing compared with a “libellous, defamatory, misogynistic and abusive” campaign against her over the past two years, which has been “hugely distressing and reputation damaging”. Her detractors’ gripe is that she was feted for flying solo when, in fact, guests joined her for the Africa trip. But the award is for a navigational feat, rather than flying unaccompanied, which makes the decision to revoke it rankle all the more.
The series of events that led to last weekend’s vote are evidence that aviation is a “boys’ club,” Curtis-Taylor remonstrates, and that there is “a long way to go before the achievements of women are recognised and valued”.
The figures appear to back her up: just 4.3 per cent of UK professional pilots were women in 2016, according to the Civil Aviation Authority. The LAA estimates that women make up 6.6-7.9 per cent of its membership – figures that are more understandable given that the RAF only formally accepted female pilots in 1994.
Some of her critics deny claims of sexism, and say they only wanted to hold her to account for “misleading the public” over whether she really made the 2013 flight alone.
“I would have been equally vociferous if she had been a man,” says Sam Rutherford, a former associate who joined her on the expedition. The controversy began when he posted messages on the LAA’s forum and the Professional Pilots Rumour Network (Pprune) highlighting that she hadn’t flown alone, as had been claimed in some media and talks.
“Fundamentally,” he adds, “if you say you have done a solo flight you really should have done it,” though he concedes that some of the hundreds of comments posted by others have been “utterly reprehensible, unfair, nasty, incorrect and misogynistic”.
“I have always been the sole pilot,” Curtis-Taylor said in 2016 when the LAA first rescinded her trophy, but later added that this did not mean she had been the only person in the aircraft. After a lengthy legal battle to reinstate her prize, the association’s latest decision has closed the matter.
The LAA says it is an independent organisation and “can see merit on both sides. Tracey has been advocating
her position but, unfortunately, it’s been giving the wrong impression of what we are,” says Stephen Slater, its chief executive. “It was perhaps once a gentleman’s club, but it most definitely isn’t these days.”
Curtis-Taylor fell in love with aircraft after watching the 1965 film Those Magnificent Men in their Flying
Machines, and visiting Canadian air shows with her father and three siblings. Taken by the “incredible allure” of old planes, she remains enchanted by their “magical quality… The way they smell with the leather and oil, they’re works of art”.
She had her first flying lesson at 16, and within five years had emigrated from Cumbria to New Zealand. “If I had stayed in this country, I could never have afforded to fly,” she recalls. “My twin sister had emigrated over there and I followed in 1983 to waitress my way through private and commercial licences.”
Fourteen years after she arrived in New Zealand, Curtis-Taylor left her family, husband and job to return to the UK and pursue her hobby near historic aviation sites.
In 2009, she was gifted a book about Lady Heath, the first woman in the UK to receive a commercial pilot’s licence and to parachute from a plane, as well as the first person to fly from Cape Town to London in a small open-cockpit aircraft.
“She was one of our finest aviators,” says Curtis-Taylor. “She does this amazing flight up Africa and then disappears from history. No one has even heard of her.”
It was serendipitous. Curtis-Taylor had longed to fly to Africa after watching Out Of Africa, and decided to recreate Lady Heath’s route in a 1942 Boeing Stearman. “I wasn’t trying to out-pioneer the pioneers. I wanted to celebrate what these women did and take the message to a new generation,” she says.
With a support team and film crew in tow, she flew 50ft above whales; spotted zebra, elephants and giraffe; navigated war zones; and narrowly escaped arrest for flying over the Ugandan president’s house.
After the euphoria of the trip and prize, however, the self-proclaimed “aviatrix and adventurer” has been left with a bitter taste, but is looking forward to future projects including a book, film and continental flight.
“In just three days, I’ll be flying my Stearman in Hungary,” she says of her impending visit to family both in Europe and New Zealand. “It has been a long, hard struggle and I’m absolutely exhausted.”
‘You don’t fly a vintage biplane across five continents and not have determination’