97 Year Old Walks Onto Wing Of Plane
Betty Bromage of Cheltenham, England, went wing walking for the first time when she was 87 years old. She liked it enough to go back. On August 5, 2026, at the age of 97 years and 127 days, she climbed onto the top of a biplane at RFC Rendcomb Airfield in Cirencester and flew, breaking her own Guinness World Record for oldest female wing walker and extending a record she first set at age 93 in 2022. The flight came one year after she suffered a stroke in August 2025, an event that still affects her speech but left the rest of her, as she put it, fine. She chose to use the flight as a fundraiser for the stroke unit at Cheltenham General Hospital, the team that cared for her after her stroke. She said they treated her so well and she wanted to give something back. Bromage has now completed six wing walks in the past decade, each one strapped to the top of a moving aircraft while it performs maneuvers above the English countryside, and she shows no particular signs of stopping.
Asked by the BBC why she keeps doing it, Betty gave an answer that required no embellishment: she said she would get bored of life otherwise. She cannot drive anymore. Her eyesight is not what it was. She gets frustrated with the limitations. So she does the things she can do. Wing walking, it turns out, is one of the things she can do, and at 97, she does it better than anyone on record. Guinness World Records certified the flight immediately. The money raised will support the unit that helped her recover, completing a loop that started with a hospital stay and ended with a woman in her late nineties strapped to the outside of an airplane flying over Gloucestershire. Betty Bromage is not a metaphor for anything. She is a 97-year-old wing walker who raised money for the stroke unit that treated her by breaking her own world record. That is just what she did.
