Zara Rutherford, a teenage pilot, said that it was tough than she expected on Thursday after completing a solo, round-the-world flight to set a new world record. The 19-year-old landed in front of a mob of media, well-wishers, and relatives at an airstrip outside of the Belgian town of Kortrijk, claiming to be the world’s youngest woman to fly solo around the globe. On the 18th of August, 2021, she embarked.
She said during a press conference that it is weird to be back here after an incredible voyage. The Belgian-British teenager, had an epic journey of five months with stops in nearly 30 countries. She was looking forward to putting her feet up in just one spot for a time. “Next week, I’d prefer to do nothing,” she joked.
Rutherford is a dual citizen of Belgium and the United Kingdom. She answered questions in English, French, and Dutch. Her parents are pilots, and her father served in the Royal Air Force.
Previously, the youngest woman to fly solo around the world was American Shaesta Waiz, who was 30 at the time of her challenge in 2017. The youngest male record holder was 18.
The “scariest” portion of her trek, she continued, was Russia’s vast, an icy region of Siberia. It is a location of the overwhelming distance between habitations and temperatures below minus 30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit).
“I’d be driving hundreds of kilometers without seeing anything human — no electrical wires, no roads, no people. I’d think to myself, ‘If the engine stopped now, I’d have a pretty huge issue,'” she explained.
She had to avoid clouds and couldn’t fly at night while navigating the world in a 325-kilogram (717-pound) Shark UL single-propeller plane that gets given to her under a sponsorship contract. Because of the limitations, she had to divert or make emergency landings many times. This included taking to the ground early this month, only a short way from Dubai, to escape getting caught in the city’s first thunderstorm in two years.
She also spent most of November in Ayan, a Russian eastern coastal town. She could not leave the place due to bad weather, relying on kind people who were “quite prepared to help with everything I could need.”
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