In 1928, Mary Heath - the first woman to hold a commercial flying licence in Britain, made front page news around the world as the first pilot, male or female, to fly solo a small, open-cockpit biplane from Cape Town to London.
In November 2013 to commemorate Lady Heath’s flight, pilot Tracey Curtis-Taylor will embark on a journey to fly her own open-cockpit Boeing Stearman biplane from Cape Town to Goodwood.
Flying in an open cockpit, exposed to the elements, is not for the faint-hearted, and the flight represents a formidable physical and logistical challenge - in a plane designed in the 1930’s, with a top speed of 95 mph, an operating ceiling of 10,000 feet and a range of only 450 miles. But this sort of extreme flying is what Curtis-Taylor, the first female pilot based at the historic Shuttleworth collection of vintage aircraft, has been doing all her life.
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