Who is Zara Rutherford and how did she circumnavigate the globe?
TEEN pilot Zara Rutherford is set to become the youngest woman to fly solo around the globe on Monday, 16 January when she lands back in Belgium.
The 19-year-old began her epic adventure in the Belgian city of Kortrijk five months ago.
Who is Zara Rutherford?
Zara Rutherford is a teenage pilot attempting to break two Guinness World Records to become the youngest woman to fly solo around the world and the first woman to circumnavigate the world in a microlight aircraft.
The current record-holder is Shaesta Waez, who completed her trip in 2017 at 30 years old.
The British-Belgian teenager, who comes from a family of pilots, started flying herself when she was 14 and gained her pilot’s licence in 2020.
It’s believed that she had spent about 130 hours of solo flights preparing her for the record attempt.
Zara has just completed her A-Levels in Mathematics, Further Mathematics, Economics, and Physics, and hopes to go to university to study computer science.
She has said that she hopes her record attempt will inspire more girls and women to study and work in STEM subjects.
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What was Zara Rutherford’s journey circumnavigating the globe?
Zara Rutherford started her 32,000-mile voyage on 18 August from Belgium, heading west.
She has since flown across five continents and visited nearly 50 countries including the US, Greenland, Colombia and South Korea.
The toughest leg so far was flying across northern Russia, she told the Reuters, because if anything went wrong, help in sub-zero temperatures would likely be hours away.
The circumnavigation includes 70 planned stops with 19 rest days and was originally going to finish in November last year but her trip has been delayed due to bad weather, visa issues and Covid restrictions.
She was hoping to complete the journey by Christmas but instead ended up in a quarantine hotel in Singapore following a flat tyre on her plane and ringing in the New Year fast asleep in a hotel in Mumbai after strong winds changed her plans.
Zara Rutherford is due to return to Belgium on Monday in her specially-made Shark ultralight plane.
When did Zara Rutherford start flying around the globe?
Zara is the daughter of two pilots and she began training when she was 14.
She has had a licence to fly since she was 17.
She said she has been flying for as long as she can remember and her biggest dreams besides flying around the world is to become an astronaut.
The teenager holds FAA and UK private pilot licences as well as Slovakian and French microlight licences. She has been a member of the Honourable Company of Air Pilots since 2019.