From the United Kingdom
           Diary tells how pioneer woman flew solo in 1932
     A LOST diary belonging to one of the first women to gain a com-
 mercial pilot's licence has been returned to her son after being
 found during a house clearance.
     Molly Barnard was a young medical student at Newnham College,
 Cambridge, when she wrote the journal that records, in neat hand-
 writing, the ups and downs of trying to master the de Havilland bi-
 plane and the exhilaration of her first solo flight in 1932. The
 college authorities had refused her time-off for flying lessons, so
 she made her own arrangements under the tutelage of Sir Arthur
 Marshall at Cambridge airport.
     After qualifying as a doctor, Miss Barnard married George Yuill,
 a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. The
 couple, who settled in Marple, Greater Manchester, had two sons who
 also became doctors and pilots. The diary was lost after the deaths
 of Mrs Yuill in 1973 and her husband six years later. It turned up
 during a house clearance by a relative of Sally Jones, a business-
 woman interested in genealogy, who spotted the name Marshall's
 Airport in the diary and traced it on the Internet.
     The diary was presented by Sir Arthur, now 94, to Dr Robert
 Yuill, 52, Miss Barnard's youngest son. Mr Yuill said: "I had no
 idea my mother had written a diary. Reading it now makes her come
 alive again. Her expressions, her speech patterns are all there. It
 is exactly her. Her character is in this book. She was a marvellous
 woman who skied, went rock climbing and loved flying at a time when
 very few women did anything like that."
     Lessons on the airstrip were 25-30 shillings an hour (1.25-1.50)
 compared with 91.50 Pounds today. Miss Barnard's diary records how
 finally she went solo, watched by Sir Arthur, late on a June evening.
 The entry reads: "You're all alone up here, I said to myself. But I
 felt so happy I could have burst, rather like looking at an exam
 paper which you could do every bally question. I banked and turned
 rather steeply I was so pleased."
     She cycled back to Newnham "as fast as I could though my dress
 flew all over the place, and every now and then I hit the handlebars
 as hard as I could and squeaked. "Half way home I said to myself
 'gosh - I've been up solo' it was a bad one . . . but I'll do better
 next time," it says in the diary.
     Sir Arthur said: "She was very good, one of six or seven girls
 who were keen on flying before the war."
 ----------------------------------
                  DoT checks crash which killed pals
     The Department of Transport is to investigate a crash which
 killed two mates flying to a stag night.
     Shane Booker and Paul Poulteney, both of Market Harborough,
 Leicestershire, hit a mountain in Snowdownia, N Wales.
     They were flying from Leicester to Blackpool, with Booker as
 pilot, when Saturday's accident occurred.
 ===
--- DB 1.39/004487
---------------