‘If a bird flew into the engine, I wouldn’t get out alive’
Aviator says striking flocks was her biggest fear as she followed Amy Johnson’s historic flightpath
BEFORE her 14,600-mile solo flight across the world, following the route of Amy Johnson, British aviator Tracey Curtis-Taylor planned for the worst, even making her own funeral arrangements.
But despite contending with “unflyable” flog, dust storms in Saudi Arabia and fierce hot winds in Australia, none of these proved to be her greatest moment of terror.
Instead, the biggest danger to her vintage open-cockpit biplane came from flying through countless flocks of vultures, eagles and buzzards.
Recalling the episode in Pakistan, after finally completing her voyage in Sydney yesterday, Curtis-Taylor said she knew as she steered that a collision with a single bird could prove fatal.
“They were massing all around, wheeling all around the plane – sometimes they were out front looking down on me,” she said of the encounter at 500ft above Karachi.
“If one flew into the engine, I wouldn’t get out [alive]. I didn’t know whether to try to dodge them or whether they would dodge me. In the end you just steer a course. Amy made the same comment in her memoirs. But the things are still there, 80 years later.”
Curtis-Taylor, 53, joked she “needed a drink”, after completing a threemonth journey to retrace a pioneering feat of the legendary aviator, who in 1930 became the first woman to fly solo between Britain and Australia.
In her tiny 1942 Boeing Stearman, a reconditioned piston-engine plane, without a parachute and using 2,100 gallons of fuel, Curtis-Taylor traversed 23 countries after taking off from Farn- borough on Oct 1 in her plane, the Spirit of Artemis. Unlike Johnson, who famously set her course by using a ruler to draw a direct line between England and Australia, Curtis-Taylor was forced to fly around warzones in the Middle East and to navigate a maze of varying airspace rules and airport regulations.
Curtis-Taylor’s voyage, aided by a support crew, eventually took her across Europe and over the Dead Sea and the Arabian desert to India, Pakistan and through Asia to Australia. In the cockpit, her only modern conveniences were a GPS device and an iPad; essential for navigating a path through military airspaces and restricted zones. But the only damage to her plane were dents from landing on a gravel strip in the Australian outback.
“It is all visual contact,” she said. “I can’t fly at night, I can’t fly in cloud, I can’t fly in severely reduced visibility. It is stick and rudder. I am flying the terrain as I see it. I have a GPS, but if I see things I like I swoop in – over emus and kangaroos, over the rivers, looking for crocodiles.”
An experienced solo pilot, Curtis-Taylor said the weather and varying winds posed almost daily challenges, including fog in eastern Europe that left her flying blind over Romania and forced her to land in a cow paddock in Hungary. In Saudi Arabia, she said, thunderstorms and dust storms forced her to “track” roads, keeping an altitude of about 100 feet. “But they still have pylons and towers,” she said. “You have to be so careful. There were jagged rock mounbloody
tains that loomed straight out of the desert. You are in lightning and it is dark as night. Every day there was something.”
Before departing, Curtis-Taylor, who lives in London, prepared a will and made funeral arrangements, including directions for the catering and music (she selected the songs Southern Cross by Crosby, Stills & Nash, about a Pacific sea voyage, and Gordon Lightfoot’s
If You Could Read My Mind).
“It is macabre, but if it all ended tomorrow this would have been a price worth paying,” she said. “Even the worst bits – when I am tired or frightened – I love being in the airplane.”
Curtis-Taylor, who grew up in England and Canada, was inspired by Johnson, who, in 1930, completed the solo voyage to Australia at the age of 26 in just 19 days.
“All my life I have heard of Amy Johnson,” Curtis-Taylor said. “She was so inexperienced, so naive, and she was pitted against a male-dominated establishment. Her astounding achievement was her flight to Australia. I can’t replicate that. I am not trying to. My flight is a tribute to that.”
Despite the fanfare awaiting her arrival in Sydney, she said she had little sensation of triumph or “completion”.
“I am overwhelmed by the fantastic messages I’ve received, but it is never finished,” she said. “I don’t have a sense of triumph or resting on laurels. I am quite a restless person. I just want to fly. I wish I was leaving tomorrow and flying on.”