Flying solo: the teenage pilot aiming to break world record
Credit: Didier Debroux
Credit: Didier Debroux
Credit: Sven Hoyaux
Credit: Didier Debroux
A teenager plans to raise awareness for gender parity in aviation by becoming the youngest female pilot to fly solo around the world
The world of aviation can still be a bit of a boys’ club and it is one industry that desperately needs more gender parity: worldwide, only five per cent of pilots are female, and in the UK, the proportion of female captains is below two per cent. As ConnectJets founder Gabriella Somerville says, “It’s a tiny percentage in what’s becoming a big market and we need to build a diverse and equally-accessible industry... we need to have more women in all different aspects of aviation. It’s fundamental to survival in the industry.”
So the aviatrixes who do manage to crack the mould are highly conspicuous for it: women such as Kirsty Moore, the first female Red Arrows pilot, and Jo Salter, Britain's first female fast jet pilot. There’s Sheila Scott, who smashed more than 100 aviation records, including a 34,000-mile flight in 1971. And there’s Somerville herself, who in 2015 won an award for entrepreneurship from the EU Women Inventors & Innovators Network for her achievements in the field.
And then of course, there’s Somerville’s hero, the trailblazing Amelia Earhart – the first female aviator to break tons of records, including being the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932, before mysteriously disappearing forever into the clouds. An enduring symbol for female empowerment (she even has a Barbie doll modeled after her), she confounded stereotypes and paved the way for every woman with their sights on the skies.
And now, meet Zara Rutherford: a 19-year-old Belgo-British pilot whose dream is to fly solo around the world. Flying’s in her blood: dad is a ferry pilot and her mum holds a private pilot’s licence, while her grandfather was also a pilot. “I’ve been flying around in light aircraft since I was four-months-old – though not always at the controls!” she says. She made her first parchute jump aged 11, and started flying herself at aged 14. To date, she’s flown solo for around 130 hours.
So she certainly wasn’t lacking in family support when she decided to turn her gap-year dream into a reality. She also thought about how she could do some good with it: “I realised that undertaking such a record attempt could give me an incredible platform from which to raise awareness of several important causes.” To this end, she’s supporting two charities Dreams Soar and Girls Who Code, which support girls and young women to enter aviation and STEM careers.
Zara began her 52 country, five continent trip on 18 August, taking off from Belgium in her custom-made microlight plane, a Shark.aero Shark UL – “a truly amazing ultralight, retractable gear, variable pitch propeller aircraft with an optimum cruising speed of 140 knots and a 100hp Rotax 91 ULS engine” – and flying westwards (“because it’s vital to get past Greenland before winter”). Shark, who is also sponsoring her, have customsied the plane, which is usually a two-seater, but removed one of them to fit in an extra fuel tank.
The journey is expected to take around two-and-half to three months, “depending on weather”, and along with her home team on the ground, monitoring those weather patterns, she’s had support from “dozens of strangers from around the world, ground handlers and airport operators and other aviation and STEM enthusiasts – who’ve offered their services and also their homes to me for accommodation on my stops. I hope to meet children from local schools so that I can share with them a little of what I’m doing and hopefully inspire a few to go into STEM or to train to fly themselves!”
Should she succeed in her goal, it’ll make her a younger record-breaker than the current title holder, who at the time of her achievement was over a decade older. “If young girls see that there are already women who have found a home in the sky, they might start to dream that they can too!” You can practically hear Amelia Earhart cheering her on from beyond the clouds.