The hardest part, Betty Bromage says, is not the flying. It is the climbing. At 97, strapped upright to a frame on the top wing of a vintage biplane, she was ready for the sky. Getting up there was the fiddly bit.

"The only problem is getting up on the wing because I'm quite short," she told the BBC. "Once you're up there, no problem. The fairground is a lot worse."

On Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026, Bromage — a former nurse who lives in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire — took off from RFC Rendcomb Airfield near Cirencester and broke her own Guinness World Record as the oldest female wing walker. Guinness lists her age at verification as 97 years and 123 days; UPI, reporting the feat on Aug. 5, put it at 127. Either way, no woman on record has done this older.

It was her sixth wing walk since she first tried the stunt at 87, back in 2016. She initially claimed the world record in 2022 at the age of 93. What makes the 2026 flight different is what happened in between: in August 2025, Bromage suffered a stroke. It still affects her speech.

A thank-you at altitude

She was treated at Cheltenham General Hospital, and this year's flight was dedicated to raising money for the hospital's stroke unit — the same team that looked after her.

"They treated me so well," she said. "It affects my words but the rest of me is fine."

Imogen Sims of the Cheltenham and Gloucester Hospitals Charity said staff were grateful for the fundraising, which the charity said would go toward equipment and support for patients and staff. "To take on such a daring challenge to support our team is amazing," Sims added.

Rendcomb is the home base of AeroSuperBatics, the long-running British wing-walking team that flies Boeing-Stearman Model 75 biplanes — open-cockpit trainers first built in the 1930s and 40s. Passengers are secured standing to a rig above the upper wing while the pilot climbs out over the Cotswold countryside. Bromage has, over the years, been game for figure eights and rolls; on the ground she uses a walker, a legacy of spinal surgery after a back injury decades ago.

'Wear out, don't rust out'

Her reasoning is refreshingly unsentimental. "I'd just get bored of life otherwise," she told the BBC. "I can't drive, I can't see very well and I get a bit frustrated. So, I want to do the things I can do."

That last clause is the whole philosophy, and it explains a track record that includes a 170-foot abseil down a Cheltenham office tower at 90 and a zip-line run in North Wales in the same year. Her personal motto, quoted in local coverage of that abseil, is "wear out, don't rust out."

Bromage says her fundraising habit traces back to a line she read on a wall at the hospital where she worked as a nurse — a reminder that we pass this way once, and that kindness should not be put off until later. She has been taking that literally for a decade now, roughly one airborne challenge a year.

Why it matters beyond the record book: stroke recovery is often framed as a narrowing of life, a list of things that stop. Bromage's answer, twelve months after hers, was to buy a very loud round of gratitude for the ward that cared for her — and to remind a few million people that the calendar is not the boss of everyone.

She is not finished, either. Asked about the future, she was already sketching the next one: "I'll have to think of something when I'm 100 — something special."