SEVERE BUMP DID NOT SCARE WOMAN FLYER.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18016, 29 November 1926, Page 8

SEVERE BUMP DID NOT SCARE WOMAN FLYER.

HAD MANY THRILLS IN JAUNT OVER SYDNEY. (Special to the “ Star.' ) SYDNEY. November 14 There is a woman in Sydney who has no nerves. She is Mr*:- M. M. Bryant, of Neutral Bay. This morning, with all the coolness of a veteran flyer, slv* made her first flight in a Moth machine a:- a pupil at Mascot, and came through the shaking of a nasty air “ pocket ” still smiling. " It was 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 aero drome 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 were driving her own car. By the way, she is a skilled motorist, and has driven her car 35,000 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 I did not disguise herself beyond putting on a leather helmet. It was the first time that a green woollen golfer had ' glowed or a pair of patent high-heeled shoes liad gleamed in the cockpit of a Moth. The first woman pupil scorned to encase herself in the khaki overalls which are the uniform of the men | members of the Aero Club. She was I prepared to risk the oil smears which accompany an air flight. Sharp Bump. Captain Leggatt took off from before 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 features 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 boolness. “It was nothing, reallv,” she said later. “It vras just a question of being in the air—that, was all.” Mrs Bryant could not be induced to go into details about her impressions 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.