Remember the time

August 1989, Gaby Kennard is the first Australian to fly solo around the globe.

Gaby Kennard was 32 when her marriage ended and she asked herself, “What do I want to do?” Every day she passed the Albion Park aerodrome and thought, “I’d love to fly.” “I finally got the strength to go in one day and say: ‘I want to learn to fly’, and that was huge for me,” she told the National Portrait Gallery. The assistant flying instructor refused to teach her, saying he didn’t believe in women flying. “Luckily, the receptionist, who was a really sweet girl, got the chief flying instructor. So I flew with him.” Once she was a qualified pilot, Gaby decided to fly solo around the world, following the path of her hero, Amelia Earhart. “I had a hell of a hard time even convincing people of what I was going to do. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have an aeroplane,” she wrote in her autobiography, Solo Woman. Gaby mortgaged her home, bought an eight-year-old, single-engine Piper Saratoga and left from Blacktown, in Sydney, on August 3, 1989.

She flew first to Cairns, then across the Pacific. Strong headwinds chewed up her fuel and she feared she’d have to “ditch in the sea” when she remembered there was a tiny island on her route. She was forced to land at a secret US Air Base. She flew on to Honolulu and then east to California, thinking the most perilous leg of her journey was behind her. But, as night fell, she switched fuel tanks and the engine cut out. Gaby plunged 1000 feet. She quickly switched back to the main tank, and for a brief second thought everything was okay. But the engine cut out again, and again. She spent a harrowing night trying to keep the engine ticking over. When she finally touched down in California, she was shaking.

Gaby headed south to Brazil and on to Africa, where she was hit by a huge storm. There was nothing for it but to hold on. “I would go thousands of feet up and down again,” she said. “How I got through it I don’t know.” After the storm passed, Gaby corrected her course and flew on to Crete, Cairo, Bahrain, India and Thailand, then south towards home. After three long months, and 54,000km, Australia’s coastline came into view. She’d done it. “As Amelia said, you gotta keep trying,” Gaby told the press. “You will get there.”