Brussels, Jan 20, (dpa/GNA) – Nineteen-year-old Zara Rutherford may well have become the youngest woman to fly solo around the world, arriving back in Belgium on Thursday after an odyssey spanning 52 countries and five continents.
Livestream footage showed her landing at the Kortrijk-Wevelgem airfield, the final stop.
Rutherford set off from the Belgian town of Kortrijk in August for an expedition that lasted 156 days in a bid to break the world record.
Whether she has done so still has to be officially confirmed by Guinness World Records. Rutherford is expecting to be named the youngest woman to complete the feat, and also the youngest person of any gender to circumnavigate solo in a microlight airplane.
Rutherford is out to beat current record-holder is Shaesta Waiz of the United States, who flew around the planet alone at the age of 30 in 2017. The male record-holder is an 18-year-old.
Belgian-British dual national Rutherford has been touting her epic journey on social media, hoping to get more women and girls interested in flying, or science and engineering more broadly.
Rutherford flew an ultralight aircraft made in Europe called a “Shark,” capable of cruising at 300 kilometers per hour, her site states.
Rutherford comes from a family of aviators: Both her Belgian mother and her English father are pilots.
She knew first-hand what the inside of a cockpit looked like when she was just a few months old.
At 14, she learned how to steer a plane and soon starting working towards her first pilot’s license.
GNA