Jean BattenToday, with the entire world at our fingertips, it’s difficult to imagine that there was a time when long-distance air travel was a heroic deed. But back in the thirties, the pioneer aviators flew at low altitudes in the midst of adverse weather, alone, without radio, relying only on the most rudimentary equipment. Some of the pioneers were women.

Jean Batten was born in Rotorua, New Zealand, in 1909, the daughter of an impoverished dentist and a dominating mother. She met renowned pilot Kingsford-Smith on a visit to Australia in 1929 and took a ride in his plane. It was then that Jean decided to become a pilot. She travelled to London, joined an aero club, and in 1930 at the age of 21 she made her first solo flight for her private pilot licence.

At twenty, Jean was a bit of a slow learner. Her colleagues described her as “far from being a natural pilot”. One of them recalled the day she crashed: flying solo, she had overshot on landing, hit a wire fence and overturned. Although she emerged physically unscathed, her confidence was shaken. She doubted that she would ever be any good at flying. Yet she persisted, urged on by the prominence of Amy Johnson’s historic flight from England to Australia in just 19.5 days.

Jean obtained her commercial licence in 1932, and immediately made two attempts to fly to Australia. In the first, the engine of her Gipsy Moth stopped, and she was forced to land short of Karachi Airfield in India. A year later, in another second-hand Gipsy Moth, she ran out of fuel, and had to land near Rome.

But Jean was no quitter. In May 1934, her day came. She knocked four days off Amy Johnson’s 1930 record, by flying alone in a tiny aircraft made of wood and fabric, from England to Australia, in just under fifteen days. To top it, she flew back. Later, she piloted a small cabin plane across the South Atlantic; and became the first person ever to fly solo from England to New Zealand. Her record (covering 14,224 miles in 11 days and 45 minutes) stood for 44 years. Her flights became legendary in the years of the Depression, when people craved escapism. Long-distance solo record flying became an epidemic. The public would literally cause traffic jams to see the flying celebrities touch down in their moment of glory. But in the late thirties, with the war looming, solo aviation records lost their appeal. Jean Batten hung up her flying helmet and went into fiercely guarded seclusion. She resurfaced briefly in the sixties, when she offered herself for media interviews. But by then, most people didn’t know her name.

The Garbo of the skies had achieved obscurity.

In 1982 she went to Majorca to look for a new home. That was the last time anybody heard from her. In fact, Jean had died in Palma just five weeks after arriving on the island. But it took five years for that fact to be unearthed. Her death certificate gives no indication of the cause of death. Nobody knows where she is buried.

copyright 1999 Yvonne Eve Walus