JEAN BATTEN

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 26, 30 July 1938, Page 26

JEAN BATTEN

STORY OF HER LIFE

Reviewing "My life." Jean Batten's autobiography, which has a foreword by the Marquess of Londonderry and which has been published by Harrap, a writer in the Literary Supplement of the London "Times" remarks that Miss Batten's life has covered twentyeight years; her flying life has occupied eight of those years, and her re-cord-breaking little more than four. Her autobiography therefore - follows the fashion set by other distinguished pilots and resolves itself largely into an account of that crowded time. Her book has the faults and the merits which mark it as her own work, and in this sense it is vastly more interesting as revealing a true personality than others which have been written with the. assistance of those skilled in the use of words. It shows her, whether consciously or not, as pleased with a woman's vanity at the receptions, the banquets, and decorations which came to her; -as thorough and determined to point of stubbornness in everything associated with a flight; as susceptible to, anxiety and fear like any less self-willed young woman; and as charmingly grateful for all the help which was given, readily enough, in acknowledgment of her fine spirit.

Characteristic touches appear at intervals throughout the book. It would -seem, for instance, that her early flights in the old Moth which cruised at eighty miles an hour, are less Vividly recorded in her memory than the later and more spectacular journeys which included flights over the South Atlantic and the Tasman Sea in her Percival Gull. The Moth had served for her prentice flights; in the Gull she was the accomplished recordbreaker. She is to be seen browbeating the petrol agent at Dakar into delivering her fuel over 65 kilometres of jungle road by night to Thies so that she might start according to schedule on her Atlantic crossing.

Of the incidents of her principal flights there are plenty to be found. Her eleven hours of storms and isolation over the South Atlantic; her anxiety when in an. electrical storm the compass swung 180 degrees and her quick decision to ignore it and keep going on blind-flying instruments; her scrupulous care in estimating drift even over the sea and allowing for it; and her uncanny facility in navigating over ocean courses with an error of not more than half a mile in her landfalls, make vivid telling. Her care for every, detail, which may well be the secret of her unfailing successes, is shown in such incidents as her discovering over the middle of the Tasman Sea that there was very little petrol in one of the tanks which she had not yet begun to use; and her power to sum up a situation and arrive quickly at a conclusion js to be seen in all her stories of flying through storms*