My vote for World’s Bravest Person currently is Karl-Heinz Zahorsky, traveling around the world in a 1985 Continental-powered Piper Malibu. The Malibu is the best personal/family airplane ever designed… as long as you have a letter from God promising that the engine won’t quit. So far he and his copilot have made it from Germany to Sri Lanka (zahorsky.net). How stressed out is that engine? I was chatting with a pilot the other day who had done a lot of long-distance Malibu trips. Asked if she’d ever had any issues she replied “No. The engine never quit. Well, once we heard a loud bang and lost oil pressure [presumably a turbocharger] and had to land. All of the emergency equipment was waiting for us by the runway, but the engine never stopped.” This was conveyed in the same tone that a Cessna 172 pilot might use to describe the failure of a backup radio.
Shaesta Waiz, 29, is at least 10 years older than the youngest pilots, e.g., Matt Guthmiller, to fly solo around the world, but she expects to be the youngest solo female pilot when she lands her leased 2001 Bonanza back in Daytona Beach. So far she has made it at least to Indonesia (her site says “At this time, flight tracking is unavailable due to the region Shaesta is flying” but there are some recent news stories from Indonesian media). The home page is devoted to relating statistics about the lack of women in aviation and STEM: “450 female airline captains worldwide; 24 percent of U.S. STEM professionals that are female; 3 percent of pilots worldwide that are female.”
[Could a 25-year-old cisgender male pilot identify as a woman for a month, become the youngest woman to fly solo around the world, and then switch back to a male ID?]
Related:
- Time for a robot assistant up in the dome light of the cockpit? (one of those 450 female airline captains and her female first officer make the news in their Airbus A320)
- Massachusetts divorce litigator on a way to have the spending power of an airline captain without going to flight school or staying in Hilton Garden Inns: “There are a lot of women collecting child support from more than one man,” Nissenbaum noted. “I remember one enterprising young lady who worked as a waitress at Boston’s Logan airport [back in the 1980s]. She targeted three airline pilots, had a child by each of them, and back then was collecting $25,000 in tax-free child support from each pilot. Of course, instead of serving food and beverages, she did have to care for those children.”
- Around the world in 1964 (a 38-year-old “flying housewife” who made it around the world in 1964, before GPS made navigation idiot-proof)
- MIT freshman will be the youngest person to fly around the world and Matt Guthmiller on the last leg of his round-the-world trip
- cozyroundtheworld.com: planning an August 2018 departure in two homemade airplanes
Phil,
you like minivans, what do you think of the P210R Centurion vs. the Malibu?
Jay: I’m not a big fan of the Cessna retracts. Also I feel that most airplanes are best as originally designed. So I don’t like the idea of a plane that was designed without pressurization and then had it bolted on. Even with the Malibu I prefer the original Continental design to the later Lycoming version (noisier, less fuel efficient, less range, slightly faster). And the TBM 700 is a much better plane than the Piper Meridian (evolved Malibu).