Fly around the world all by yourself. 19-year-old Zara Rutherford wants to do this – pandemic or not – in the coming months. If she succeeds, it will be a world record.
Brussels – once it takes off, there will only be you and your plane – and the big, wide world. At the age of 19, the young pilot Zara Rutherford wants to be the youngest woman to fly around the world alone.
“The moment I take off, I forget everything else,” said Rutherford in an interview with the German Press Agency. That’s the best thing about flying. Their adventure is set to begin on Wednesday from Brussels.
Zara was practically born to fly. Both her Belgian mother and her English father are pilots. So when she was just a few months old, she knew what the inside of an airplane cockpit looked like. Several air miles should follow. At 14, the student learned how to fly an airplane and worked towards her first license.
Now the goal is: world record. So far, this has been held by the American Shaesta Waiz, who flew around the planet alone at the age of 30. The male record holder is an 18-year-old – for Zara also a sign of inequality between the sexes. She hopes to get more girls interested in science and aviation and is supporting two non-profit initiatives as part of her record attempt – “Dreams Soar” and “Girls Who Code”.
The project is reminiscent of the sailor Laura Dekker from the Netherlands, who started sailing around the world alone when she was just 14 years old. Previously, there had been a long legal dispute about whether Dekker was allowed to travel alone at all.
Zara, who has both British and Belgian citizenship, doesn’t have to worry about that as an adult. As a sports pilot, she is even exempt from most quarantine regulations, so that even the pandemic has not yet been able to stop her. She still wants to and has to do regular tests. “The last thing I want is to drag Covid around the world.”
From Belgium, Zara first heads towards her British homeland, then via Iceland to Greenland and further west. In between, she will find shelter with friends and supporters all over the world. The planned arrival back in Belgium is around three months later, on October 23rd. Maybe it will be faster, maybe it will take longer. Zara has time, she took a gap year after school. “The unexpected” is what the pilot has the most respect for – but also what she looks forward to most, as she tells us before her trip.
Zara prepared for the trip as meticulously as possible. Even if not everything can be planned, your adventure should be “as safe as possible” – especially when difficult weather conditions or technical difficulties in the distance cause turbulence. Many extensive safety training courses have been on the program in the past few weeks. The ultralight aircraft that Zara wants to fly around the world belongs to the “Shark” series and, according to the manufacturer, is one of the fastest in the world. Zara will finance her trips with the help of sponsors and savings. She sacrificed her own car for the adventure and sold it.
While many of Zara’s generation organize themselves in climate movements and some boycott flying altogether, Zara is drawn to the air. But the term “flight shame” is not a foreign word for Zara either. To compensate for the emissions from her trip, she has trees planted for several hundred euros. “I don’t want to say that I’m helping the climate,” she says. “But I try to reduce my ecological footprint as much as possible.” In addition, for the entire circumnavigation of the world, your light aircraft consumes about as many emissions as a passenger plane does in ten minutes. In a few years, Zara still hopes, such a trip will hopefully be possible with an electrically powered airplane.
And what comes after a circumnavigation of the world? Even before take-off, Zara’s ambitions go far beyond that – into space. After her adventure, the Belgian wants to study computer science and electrical engineering – with the aim of becoming an astronaut. dpa
