{"id":759420,"date":"2022-01-20T21:45:08","date_gmt":"2022-01-20T21:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/01\/20\/belgian-british-teen-pilot-completes-round-the-world-feat-after-a-52-country-five-continent-flight\/"},"modified":"2022-01-20T21:45:08","modified_gmt":"2022-01-20T21:45:08","slug":"belgian-british-teen-pilot-completes-round-the-world-feat-after-a-52-country-five-continent-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/01\/20\/belgian-british-teen-pilot-completes-round-the-world-feat-after-a-52-country-five-continent-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"Belgian-British teen pilot completes round-the-world feat after a 52-country, five-continent flight"},"content":{"rendered":"

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by Jeremy Audouard<\/p>\n

Kortrijk \u2013 “It was harder than I imagined,” said teenage pilot Zara Rutherford on Thursday after completing a solo, round-the-world flying odyssey with the aim of getting into the record books.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The 19-year-old touched down at an airfield outside the Belgian town of Kortrijk to a crowd of journalists, well-wishers and family, laying claim to being the youngest woman to have circumnavigated the globe alone in a cockpit.<\/p>\n

She set off, just over five months ago, on 18 August, 2021.<\/p>\n

“It’s very strange being back here,” she told a media conference, adding that, after an epic journey with stops in nearly 30 countries, she was looking forward to putting her feet up for a while in just one place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“I’d like to do nothing next week” she laughed.<\/p>\n

Rutherford, who has Belgian and British nationality, fielded questions in English, French and Dutch. Both her parents are pilots, and her father flew for Britain’s air force.<\/p>\n

She explained that Russia’s vast, frozen expanse of Siberia was the “scariest” leg of her journey: a place of overwhelming distance between habitations, and where the temperature fell below minus 30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“I’d be going hundreds and hundreds of kilometres without seeing anything human — I mean no electricity cables, no roads, no people — and I thought ‘if the engine stopped now I’d have a really big problem’,” she said.<\/p>\n

Navigating the world in a tiny, 325-kilogramme (717-pound) Shark UL single-propellor plane, loaned to her under a sponsorship deal, meant she had to skirt around clouds and could not fly at night.<\/p>\n

The restrictions meant many times she had to divert or make hasty landings — including taking to ground quickly early this month, just a short distance from Dubai, to avoid getting caught in the first thunderstorm that city had seen in two years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There was also a long three-week stretch for most of November in a Russian eastern coastal town called Ayan where she could not take off because of the weather, relying on kind locals who were “very willing to help with anything I might need”.<\/p>\n

Agence France-Presse (AFP)<\/strong><\/p>\n

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by Jeremy Audouard Kortrijk \u2013 “It was harder than I imagined,” said teenage pilot Zara Rutherford on Thursday after completing a solo, round-the-world flying odyssey with the aim of getting into the record books. The 19-year-old touched down at an airfield outside the Belgian town of Kortrijk to a crowd of journalists, well-wishers and family, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":759421,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-759420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=759420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=759420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=759420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=759420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}