Maude Bonney

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Maude Rose "Lores" Bonney OBE (1897 - February 24, 1994) was an Australian aviatrix and the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia.

[edit] External links

• Monash University, 2004, Hargrave : the Pioneers, Celebrating the bicentennial of aviation 1804-2004

Born November 20.1897 as Maude Rose Rubens, in Pretoria, South Africa. (She adopted the name "Lores" later in preference to her given names.) The family moved first to England, then to Australia. After education first in Melbourne, and then at a finishing school in Germany, she met and married Harry Bonney, a leather goods manufacturer in 1917 and moved to Brisbane, Queensland. In 1928 she met Harry Bonney's cousin, Bert Hinkler, the Queensland aviator who had set a solo England-Australia record in his Avro Avian biplane. (Now in the Queensland Museum, Brisbane). His exploits fired her imagination and her first flight in his Avian confirmed her determination to learn to fly. She took her first lessons secretly, but when she told her husband, he bought her the DH 60 Gypsy Moth with which she began her record-breaking flights:

. 1931 DH 60G VH-UPV Brisbane-Wangaratta 1600kms. Longest one-day flight by an airwoman. . 1932 DH 60G VH-UPV Round-Australia 12,800 kms. First woman to circumnavigate Australia by air . 1933 DH 60G VH-UPV Brisbane-Croydon (U.K.) 20,000kms. First woman to fly from Australia to England. . 1937 Klemm L32-V VH-UVE Brisbane-Cape Town 29,088kms. First flight Australia to South Africa.

The outbreak of war ended her flying career just as she was planning her next flight - around the world, via Japan, Alaska and the USA.. VH-UVE was destroyed in a hangar fire in 1939. VH-UPV was requisitioned for the war effort, deployed to a flying training unit, declared unsurviceable and scrapped after the war. Lores Bonney died at her home at Miami on Queensland's Gold Coast in 1994, aged 96. For her Australia-England flight, she was awarded an O.B.E. by King George V. The Bonney Trophy which she presented in England is still awarded annually to an outstanding British woman pilot. The Australian Women Pilots Association has established a trophy in her honour. Lores Bonney was inducted into the "Ninety-Nines" the American society of women flyers who had pioneering roles in aviation. Her name was placed on the wall of the Flyer's Chapel at California's St. Francis Atrio Mission alongside the names of icons such as Charles Lindbergh, Charles Kingsford Smith and Amelia Earhart. Griffith University, Queensland, awarded her an honorary doctorate for her services to aviation. But Lores Bonney's achievements and flights have largely been forgotten, overshadowed by other women pilots of her era who received more promotion and publicity. And unfortunately, both her aircraft, which would today command a respected place in an Australian aviation museum, no longer exist.