An eighty three year old woman completes a solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
Having started in her home city of Washington DC (District of Columbia), with stops in Newfoundland and Iceland, Marion Rice Hart landed her single engine Beechcraft plane at Shannon Airport last weekend, before flying to Dublin.
Aviation experts believe she is the oldest woman pilot to have flown solo across the Atlantic. This is not the first time that Marion Rice Hart made this journey. In 1953 she flew from Newfoundland to Shannon accompanied by a professional pilot who acted as her navigator.
The first woman to graduate as a chemical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she worked as a sculptor in France in the 1930s. An experienced sailor, Marion Rice Hart is the author of three books about her adventures and has written for magazines.
During World War II she joined the Army Signal Corps, and in 1946 decided to take up flying lessons, as
I thought it might be interesting.
Most people would find being on their own for nine hours in a small plane's cockpit a trial. This does not bother a pilot like Marion Rice Hart.
You just don’t do anything. You sit.
An RTÉ News report broadcast on 15 September 1975. The reporter is Mícheál Ó Briain.
