WOMAN FLYER.

Thames Star, Volume LX, Issue 16959, 4 December 1926, Page 7

WOMAN FLYER.

REMARKABLY STEADY NERVES.

There is a woman in Sydney who has no nerves.

She is Mrs. M. H. Bryant, of Neutral Bay. This morning, with all the coolness of a. veteran flyer, she made her first flight in a Moth machine as a pupil at Mascot, and came through the shaking of a nasty air “pocket?’ still smiling. “It w,as one of the worst bumps I’ve experienced in six years of flying,” said Captain Leggatt, instructor of the Aero Club, who piloted the Moth during Mrs Bryant’s instructional flight.

Mrs. Bryant was the first woman pupil of the Aero Club to be taken up in a Moth. But, for a woman, she has remarkably steady nerves. The forest of chimney stacks at Waterloo and St. Peters, rushing at her at the rate of sixty miles an hour, did not dismay her. Nor did she quail before a gusty wind, which Chopped across the aerodrome from the Bondi heights, and now and then made the Moth slip and , sway. With her shingled head encased in a leather helmet, Mrs. Bryant sat in the cockpit of the machine, behind Captain Leggatt, with all the ease and poise, as if she wei-e driving her own car. By the way .she is a skilled motorist, and has driven her ca,f 35,00 Q miles. INSTRUCTION FIRST. For nearly an hour before the flight; Mrs. Bryant was shown the mechanical mysteries of the Moth. Captain Leggatt explained to her how the machine was started and driven and controlled and stopped. Rolling up the sleeves of her woollen golfer, she climbed on to a box, and thrust her hand through a little door, and amid the vital mechanism of the ’plane behind the propeller. When all was ready Mrs. Bryant climbed briskly into the machine. She did not disguise herself beyond putting on .a leather helmet-. It was the first time that a green woollen golfer had glowed o.r a pair of patent high-heelecl shoes had gleamed in the cockpit of a Moth. The first woman pupil scorned to encase herself in the kliaki overalls which are the uniform of the men members of the Aero Club. She was prepared to risk the oil smears which accompany an air flight. SHARP BUMP. 'Captain Leggatt took off from be-, hind the main hangar, and at first raced with his pupil almost due east in the direction of Botany Bay. Beyond the new club-house which is being built at the aerodrome, he turned south towards Bondi.

It was then that the machine ran into a very disturbing air pocket. The bump was severe, the machine was seen to drop suddenly, but rose again almost immediately. Captain Leggatt said afterwards that the sun beating on iron roofs, on trees and on differing feature of the landscape caused varying degrees of heat to radiate back through the air. This had probably caused the pocket into which the Moth had glided. Still Mrs. Bryant took this thrill as being part of the instructional course. Captain Leggatt admired her coolness. “It was nothing, really,” said later. “It was just a question of being in the air—that was all.”

Mrs. Bryant could not be induced to go into details about her impression of her first flight. She treated the whole affair as being as commonplace as a drive in her car, in which she was whirled back to the city.