Zara Rutherford, 19, had been en route from Iceland to Greenland for about 20 minutes when her small plane lost radio contact with the outside world.
While flying about 1,500 feet above the Denmark Strait, staying low to avoid clouds, she listened to a podcast in which a YouTube celebrity claimed that the only certainty in life is death.
“I was like, well, that’s kind of what worries me,” Mrs. Rutherford said. “That was pretty funny and it made me laugh. If only she knew!”
Ms Rutherford, a Belgian and British woman, started her journey in Belgium last week and plans to return there on November 3 after a flight across 52 countries on five continents.
If she does, she would overtake Shaesta Waiz to become the youngest woman to travel the world solo in a single-engine plane. (Travis Ludlow, an aviator from Britain, did so in July at age 18.)
Two months ago, Mrs. Rutherford emailed Mrs. Waiz, 34, who completed the trip in 2017, asking if it was OK to challenge her record. The answer was an enthusiastic yes.
“I’ve told her I’m so proud of her for being so brave — and so young — to do this,” Ms Waiz said. “That’s the thing with records: they’re meant to be broken.”
Ms. Rutherford said she saw her own journey not only as a personal challenge, but also as a means of raising awareness about the gender gap in areas such as aviation, science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
During the trip, she used social media to showcase the stories of notable women in aviation and other fields. On her list are Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman in the United States to earn a pilot’s license, and Lilian Bland, a British aviation pioneer believed to be the first woman to design, build, and fly her own aircraft. .
After Mrs. Rutherford arrived in Iceland last week, she met 30-year-old Justice Minister Aslaug Arna Sigurbjornsdottir in a hangar at the airport. “Such a great example for women to see that we are capable of so much more than we sometimes think, believe or dream!” Mrs. Rutherford wrote on Facebook.
As a child, Mrs. Rutherford said, she didn’t have many female role models. People would tell her about Amelia Earhart, the American aviator who disappeared in 1937 while traveling around the world. “But as an 8- or 9-year-old,” Ms. Rutherford added, “it’s not someone you really know or look up to.”
Closer to home she found other role models. Her mother, Beatrice De Smet, is a recreational pilot and her father, Sam Rutherford, is a professional who transports planes around the world for clients. She has accompanied him for years, sometimes flying herself.
Her longest journey to date was from Texas to Jordan. “Well, it was meant to go from Texas to India, but I had to go back to school,” she said with a laugh in a phone interview from Greenland.
This time crossing the Atlantic is just the beginning. She will hug the east coast of the United States before diving into Colombia via the British Virgin Islands. Then she goes through Mexico, along the west coast of California and north to Alaska, after a detour to Montana.
After crossing Russia over the Bering Strait, she flies over China, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, before returning to Europe. She said the only country she deliberately avoided was North Korea.
The route is almost comically tortuous, in part, she said, because her two-seat plane can’t fly long distances over oceans, but also because she likes the idea of a grand adventure.
“I could have cut it short, but I feel like that would have been pretty boring,” she said.
Sponsors and airports collect the costs of the trip and a company in Slovakia, Shark Aero, supplies her with the plane. She also has support staff to handle landing duties and other logistics, and her father advised her from the ground on technicalities.
For example, after her radio went out during the trip to Greenland, he texted her asking if she could climb through holes in the clouds to a height where visibility would be better.
Michael Fabry, a ferry pilot living in Belgium who happened to fly about 3,500 feet above Mrs. Rutherford during part of her journey from Iceland to Greenland, said she would benefit immensely from having a support crew to help with logistics, particularly in Asia and the Middle East.
But she will inevitably encounter high winds, he added, as well as clouds she can’t fly through because her plane isn’t certified to fly on instruments alone.
“That means she has to fly very low, and very low is not a safe state when you are above water,” said Mr Fabry, a former commercial pilot, by telephone.
“She does have some experience, but what she does is really, really, really brave, I must say,” he added. “I’m a bit worried. I’m sure the rest of the world is concerned too.”
Ms Rutherford said she was under pressure to reach Russia at the end of September to prevent the onset of bad weather, and that safety was her priority. Before taking off, she practiced escaping from an airplane in an underwater simulator.
She finds flying over water stressful, she said, and listens to podcasts to calm her nerves. When she made a windy landing in Greenland last week after being without radio contact for most of the three-hour flight from Iceland, she sent her parents a two-word text message: “I’m alive.”
“It was a very long flight. I’m really happy to be on the ground, to be honest,” she said in an Instagram video, adding that at one point the low clouds forced her to fly just 600 feet above the ocean.
She was delayed two days in Greenland – where she hung out with some NASA scientists – because of bad weather. But on Monday, she completed her transatlantic crossing by landing in Goose Bay, Canada. Fire trucks on the tarmac welcomed her with a water cannon salute.
On Thursday, Ms. Rutherford will land at New York’s Kennedy International Airport, a rare destination for an aircraft only about 22 feet long. (That was her dad’s idea; he thought it would be cool.)
“It will definitely be the biggest airport I will ever land in my life,” she said. “So I’m pretty excited.”
