Woman completes solo flight
Global trip took pilot 155 hours
The sunsets over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were a highlight. Sowas the Saudi Arabian desert after takeoff from Abu Dhabi. Over the Mediterranean Sea, heavy rain kept her single-engine plane bouncing.
Through the beautiful views and whatever the weather would throw at her, Julie Wang says she wasn’t nervous.
“When I’m flying, I just do whatever I’m supposed to do,” Wang said Thursday.
Wang, 43, of West Palm Beach, became the latest person to fly solo around the world, and she and her husband Jim Frechter say she is the first-ever Chinese person to accomplish the feat.
And while it appears there is no official agency or organization that tracks around-the-world solo flights, Earthrounders.com, a website that documents small-aircraft flights around the globe, shows Wang to be the only Chinese pilot on its list of 118 known globe-circling solo flights since 1933.
After taking off on her nearly 24,000-mile journey from Dallas, Texas, where she leased the aircraft she used, on Aug. 17, she would wrap up the journey there on Sept. 19.
Her total flight time was 155 hours.
Wang, a flight instructor at a Stuart-based flight training school, Zulutime Pilot, grew up in China, where her parents were aerospace engineering professors.
After moving to the U.S. six years ago with her husband, an attorney, she got her pilot’s license in 2011. She says all of the aviation training she’s done since then culminated in her justfinished round-the-globe trip.
“She flew almost around the equator in a straight line,” Frechter said.
Using a Cirrus SR22 singlepropeller plane, Wang landed in Merced,
Calif., after departing Dallas. There, she would spend about two weeks getting the appropriate approvals for the extra fuel tanks she would be using, as well as having those fuel tanks installed.
From Merced, she would fly to Honolulu on Sept. 2. It was almost 14 hours over the Pacific.
“For me, it’s a normal flight,” she said. “I’ve had very [good] training. It’s just another long flight and I need to manage the risk.”
The next stop was Majuro, the capital city of the Marshall Islands. From there it was on to Guam, then the Philippines.
Wang, who had help from several sponsors, would stay in hotels along the way, and estimates that the total cost of the trip, including the rental of the plane, to be more than $100,000.
After the Philippines, the next stop was China, then Thailand, India, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, the Greek island of Crete, Malta, Portugal, and Santa Maria Island in the Azores.
From the Azores, it was a jump across the Atlantic Ocean to St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. Then Bangor, Maine. The second tostop was Stuart. And then back to Dallas.
“Itwas amazing,” she said of the journey.
Wang said her husband and 16-year-old daughter were fully supportive in her endeavor. She said she hopes to encourage others to learn howto fly.
Asked why she wanted to fly solo around the world, Wang said it was a personal challenge and a way to get out of her comfort zone, but also away to continue to become a better pilot.
Aswell, she wanted to renew her love of flying.
“I needed to remind myself why I started to get into aviation,” she said. West Palm Beach resident Julie Wang, seen here flying over the Pacific Ocean, has just completed a solo flight around the world.