Shirley Jennings, first British woman gyronaut since 1934

I am chuffed to bits to have just received my copy of Spinning in the Wind, by Shirley Jennings. I contacted Shirley through her publishers just over a week ago, and since then we have established a very entertaining email correspondence.

Last year I wrote to a lady called Marion Springer, who is legendary among American single seat gyrocopter pilots as a great teacher of gyrocopter flying, who started building and flying Bensens in their heyday in the 1960s. I had only just heard of her then, when I had seen her on a YouTube video, very aged and deaf, being interviewed at a gyro convention. Shortly after I wrote, she died.

I later heard from one of her daughters that she had said, "I must write back to this young man" and had been enthusiastic about a project I am working on, and for which I wanted to interview her. I missed the boat with Marion Springer, but I am delighted to have discovered Shirley in good time, as she is my age! She never met Marion either, but they corresponded and shared the same philosophy of autogyro flying. They both learned to fly gyros by the methods developed by Igor Bensen and those who built his designs from plans; learned to fly them as gliders towed behind cars, then motorised them.

I have yet to read Shirley's book, of course, but I have read one of her articles, Short Hops, on her website, and it is similar enough in style to a flying manual Marion Springer wrote to reassure me that they had the same philosophy about flying single seaters. I am a convert on the strength of Stringer's books, but in Shirley I have a friend who can make it reality, as she has very kindly offered her help in getting me flying the Bensen way.....which is really about establishing muscle memory...sensitive to what the rotor is doing.

It needs saying, here, that you can no longer learn to fly, ab initio, on Bensen style gyros. These days you must complete a course of training, first, in what is referred to as a "New Generation" gyroplane. I won't go into the details of the controversy surrounding the tension between the two schools of thinking, whether New Generation or "Legacy". What I will say, though, is that there is a small group of us who are in love with the idea of flying "minimal" gyros, inspired largely by the Gyro Captain in Mad Max 2 and the James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, and having read everything we can lay our hands on by Bensen.

And two of us are plotting to learn in a gyro-glider which I am currently refurbishing, and we are going to be taught by Britain's first woman gyronaut, Shirley Jennings - a legend in my own lifetime!