Ripcord Adventure Journal 2.1

Lady Icarus: The life of Aviator Lady Mary Heath
Lindie Naughton
bundled her into the car and drove back to their farm, where the
patient “weeping like a kid” was put to bed. In the evening, Captain
Douglas Mail of the Rhodesian Aviation Syndicate agreed to rescue
Lady Mary’s machine. Reporting back, he told her that there was
not too much damage, although the machine was bone dry of oil
and “owing to a bend in the undercarriage fitting, the port forward
flying wire was loose.”
Her disappearance had made front-page headlines in the South
African press. “The absence of any news in any of the newspapers
published on Saturday night and Sunday morning of the arrival in
Bulawayo of Lady Heath, who set out in her Avro Avian from
Pretoria on Saturday morning, caused intense excitement throughout
the union,” said the Rand Daily Mail. The newspaper had received
hundreds of calls from concerned members of the public. Prominent
members of the South African air force had been planning to start a
search.
They speculated that she might have been blown off course. Air
force members had escorted her as far as Warmbaths, along a route
that followed the railway line. From this point, she had left the
railway and would have been relying entirely on compass bearings.
There was a strong wind blowing from the northwest, which meant
that she could have drifted several degrees to the east and been
forced to land in an unknown part of the veldt. As it happens, she
was not far off her course when forced to land.
When it left Pretoria a day earlier, the Avro Avian was carrying
enough petrol for over ten hours’ flying, the consumption of the
engine being 20.4 litres per hour and the average cruising speed 128
kph. Lady Mary had passed Warmbaths at 8.45 am and should have
appeared in Bulawayo at 2pm or soon after. News that she was safe
came though at 7.30pm the following day from the newspaper’s
Bulawayo correspondent. After she had spent the night in a native
hut, a party of motorists had discovered an exhausted Lady Heath
earlier that day, he reported, adding that oil trouble appeared to
have been the cause of the forced landing.
14