With flying in her genes she gives wing to her dreams
Flying solo around the world, 19-year-old British-Belgian pilot Zara Rutherford shares her experiences during a stopover in Sri Lanka
After four months skimming the earth’s lonely horizon in a small Shark ultralight aircraft, Zara Rutherford in Colombo’s December glare looks exhausted yet elated.
Having broken her epic journey briefly in Ratmalana last Tuesday, Zara, just 19 years and still with the candour of a teenager that camouflages her inner steel - has less than three weeks to become the youngest woman to fly solo around the world, the first woman to circumnavigate the world in a microlight, and the first Belgian to circumnavigate the world solo in a single engine aircraft.
With a curtain of blonde hair, and clad in an Amelia Earhart T-shirt, Zara is unassuming and almost shy.
Braving the skies from the Sub Arctic to India, she had her aviator genes to bank on, and moreover the support of a family who believed that dreams are there to be chased.
Zara’s great grandmother was a pilot, and so, down the line and scattered among others, were her parents. A Belgian-English family that lives now in Kortrijk, sunny Flemish country, the Rutherfords had always loved the heights.
Her father being a ferry pilot, Zara was three months when she first flew. He later passed the controls gradually to her eager hands, and she was to end up in flying school by 15.
The idea of flying solo like Amelia Earhart, Lillian Bland, Bessie Coleman and Valentina Tereshkova, had always haunted her despite the enormous ‘expenses, dangers and complications’ that cost those women to navigate the air from the dim icy wastes of the Arctic to the wild aboriginal outback.
Last year, as her school career was drawing to a close, she realized it was now her chance. He route was planned keeping in mind the Guinness world record requirements. She had essentially to cover two antipodal points (she had to go from one point of the earth to the exact opposite side).
So far, 75% of this five month odyssey has been achieved.
It was epic to fly over the volcanoes of Iceland fuming, landscapes of Greenland like giant basins of ice, great lakes reflecting massive snow capped mountains and of course, New York City, she says.
In Alaska she would pass long distances seeing nothing human. “In some countries I’d fly for hundreds of kilometres without seeing any sign of humanity or civilizationjust nature- which can be quite scary sometimes but also really beautiful.”
Sri Lanka, her 56th stop, was initially not in her route, but was later substituted for Bangladesh- ‘due to safety reasons and COVID reasons’.
In California she saw a rocket being launched - ‘pretty incredible’ when seen from the heavens - and in Sri Lanka she says the cuisine with its diversity was ‘pretty special’.
Being stuck in Alaska for a month and then Russia for another, complicated things, and in the former country, over tundra, she faced a temperature of -35 degrees, which she did not know if her engine could cope with.
Flying out of Singapore, she met a ‘slightly grey cloud’ she did not at first worry about; “and then suddenly my heart skipped a beat because there was a lightning strike, and it turned out I was flying right next to a thunderstorm without realizing it and it was growing.”
Hovering over oceans and deserts all alone could be peaceful, but you could be visited by a sudden pining for friends and family. Podcasts and music helped in such moments.
Zara still has 10 countries to visit before mid-January, when she would land again in Belgium: India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany and France.
But even more important for her than the record is the message she is carrying. For the voyage is really a crusade to “encourage girls and young women to pursue their dreams and promote aviation and STEM-related careers (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) for them.”
While previously the youngest woman to fly solo, Shaesta Waiz, was 30, her male counterpart got the laurels at 18.
Zara herself will soon start a degree in engineering and wants to be an astronaut as well.
Already, she has messages on social media from girls and women ‘as well as boys’ confirming that her adventure has entered the imagination of youths around the globe.
Asked what she would do to celebrate her triumphal landing at Kortrijk two and a half weeks hence, Zara laughs that there is a nice small sandwich shop in the airport near her grandmother’s house where she will be landing.
“I think it’ll be very nice to have a meal with the family,” she says.