Odyssey: A Daring Transatlantic Journey

“The ultimate challenge for the pilot of a single-engine land plane is to cross the big pond–any ocean will do,” writes Susan Oliver. “It’s a little, I would imagine, like the pianist. Beyond scales and Czerny lie Mozart’s Twenty-third and Carnegie Hall.”

In 1966, Susan Oliver–actress and aviator–became the first American in years to receive permission to fly a private plane into Russia. Twelve months later, she set out. Her objective was to establish ten world records, for both men and women, in the category of single-engine aircraft weighing three thousand pounds. Her route would take her approximately eight thousand miles, mostly over dangerous North Atlantic waters.

She would fly from New York City to Canada, to Greenland, to Iceland, to Scotland, to Copenhagen in Denmark, and from there, after picking up a Soviet “communicator,” she planned to fly to Moscow.

Not that she didn’t have serious doubts, she informs us: “I have not had time to learn ditching procedures, try out the electric compass, figure out how to work the emergency oxygen tank, or really understand the portable high-frequency radio contraption.”

Then why was this otherwise intelligent and sensible young woman flying a single-engine plane over the Atlantic to Russia? Because she was attempting “to keep this man I care for interested in me. Or at least, I think I am. Now that really is a stupid reason to sally forth on an adventure where, if one nut or bolt goes and I crash in frozen waters, I’ll have less than one minute to live….”

Odyssey is both a thrilling adventure saga and the account of how her risk-taking enabled Miss Oliver to overcome a broken romance, become her own person, and triumph over personal frustration.