Zara Rutherford becomes youngest woman to fly the world solo

(CNN) — Teenage aviator Zara Rutherford has develop into the youngest woman to fly round the world solo.

The 19-year-old, who has twin British-Belgian nationality, landed at Kortrijk-Wevelgem Airport in western Belgium on Thursday, finishing an epic 41-country journey spanning over 52,000 kilometers (32,300 miles), and broke two Guinness World Records in the course of.

“I made it,” Rutherford, who obtained a rapturous welcome on her arrival, advised reporters.

Not solely has she overwhelmed the file held by American Shaesta Waiz, who was 30 when she circumnavigated the globe unaccompanied in 2017, Rutherford additionally now holds the title for the first woman to circumnavigate the world in a microlight plane.

She can also be the first Belgian to fly round the world alone.

However, the teenager’s route to glory hasn’t been with out its challenges.

When Rutherford departed on August 18, 2021 in a bespoke Shark ultralight plane, she believed her aerial escapade would take about three months.

Mission accomplished

But she was stricken by setbacks, together with month-long delays in each Alaska and Russia due to “visa and weather issues,” pushing her schedule again eight weeks.

“I would say the hardest part was definitely flying over Siberia — it was extremely cold. It was minus 35 degrees Celsius on the ground,” Rutherford mentioned throughout a press convention on Thursday.

“If the engine were to stall, I’d be hours away from rescue and I don’t know how long I could have survived for.”

She was additionally pressured to make an unscheduled touchdown in Redding, California due to poor visibility on account of the wildfires in the Seattle space and was later denied permission to fly over China.

While she’s flown to an array of locations, resembling Singapore, Egypt and Greece, together with Russia and South Korea, Rutherford has been unable to discover any of them on land due to Covid-19 restrictions.

The last leg of her journey was additionally hit with delays due to dangerous climate, which meant her completion date was moved again one other week.

Record-breaking mission

Rutherford is at the moment on a niche yr and plans to go to college in September to examine laptop engineering. Although each of her mother and father are pilots and she or he has been studying to fly since she was 14, Rutherford did not get her first license till 2020.

One of her predominant goals for this problem, apart from breaking Waiz’s file, was to guarantee higher visibility for women in aviation.

Last yr, Rutherford spoke of her disappointment at the incontrovertible fact that simply 5.1% of airline pilots round the globe are women, in accordance to figures from the International Society of Women Airline Pilots (ISA).

Raising consciousness

Rutherford has been supporting two charities on her journey: Girls Who Code, which helps younger women coming into laptop science, and Dreams Soar, a nonprofit based by Waiz, that helps women and girls coming into STEM fields.

She hopes that her high-profile journey will encourage extra younger girls and women to contemplate a profession in aviation.

“It’s an easy thing to say, but just go for it,” Rutherford added. “If you don’t try and see how high you can fly, then you’ll never know.”

The two-seat ultralight plane she accomplished the journey in was supplied by Shark Aero, certainly one of the sponsors for the journey, with customizations resembling a second radio, and an extra gas tank in the place the place the second passenger seat would sometimes sit.

CNN’s Rebecca Cairns additionally contributed to this report.