Jean Batten, the New Zealand aviator who set the world’s records and then disappeared for forty years

A deep-dive profile by NEWS WIRE

On 16 October 1936, just before five in the afternoon, a small green-and-silver Percival Gull rolled to a stop on the grass at Mangere aerodrome, south of Auckland. The pilot stepped down. She was twenty-seven years old. She had been flying for eleven days and forty-five minutes. She had flown alone, from Lympne in Kent to Mangere in New Zealand, the first person of either sex to make the journey direct. She had crossed the Tasman in nine and a half hours through cloud, without a radio.