Zara Rutherford has become the youngest woman ever to fly solo around the world.
A Belgian-British teenager has flown into the record books by becoming the youngest woman to fly solo around the world.
Zara Rutherford, 19, touched down at Kortrijk-Wevelgem airport in Flanders just after 1pm local time on Thursday, completing a 52,000km (28,100 nautical mile) journey that took in 31 countries across five continents.
Making a smooth landing on the runway, she became the first woman to fly alone around the world in a microlight plane and the first Belgian to circumnavigate the globe solo by air.
Rutherford’s parents are pilots and started taking her up in small planes when she was a toddler. By the age of 14 she was learning to fly and dreaming of a round-the-world trip.
On 18 August last year she took off in her two-seater Shark Aero, one of the fastest lightweight aircraft in the world, which can reach speeds of up to 300km/h. Flying west, she stopped in the UK, Greenland, the Americas and Russia, then looped down to south-east Asia, north to India, the Middle East and Egypt, and back to Europe.
She said there had been “amazing moments”, but also times when she had feared for her life. “I’d say the hardest part was flying over Siberia, because it was just extremely cold. It was minus 35 degrees on the ground … If the engine were then to stop, I’m hours away from rescue and I don’t know how long I could survive.”
Rutherford also had to navigate fast-changing Covid restrictions and bureaucracy. She cancelled a stop in China after a government change of rules meant she would have had to quarantine.
This became one of the scariest moments of the trip, when she had to navigate one of the busiest aviation routes in the world to reach South Korea while avoiding Chinese and North Korean airspace.