BEFORE 1997, Jennifer Murray was best known simply as the wife of Hong Kong taipan Simon Murray, a former French Foreign Legionnaire whose taste for adventure and friends in high places had made him one of the city's more colourful characters. But then she decided to do some risk-taking of her own.
Despite having taken up flying only three years earlier, Murray set about becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in a helicopter. The daredevil jaunt earned her a spot in the annals of Guinness World Records, and finally established her own identity.
'I became a person in my own right,' says the youthful-looking, tanned 63-year-old, streaks of sunlight illuminating her face as she sits on a sofa at her spacious Peak home. 'My husband was always the major focus and my friends inevitably came from his friends. I was largely busy with bringing up a family, looking after my husband and running my own textile company.
'For a lot of women, when their children grow up and get their own lives, there is a vacuum. But for me it never happened. My husband bought a half share in a helicopter and I learned to fly ... actually before he did, because he was so busy,' she says.
Not content with pottering around the English countryside (the couple have a home near Bath), Murray decided to make a bid for the record books. The resulting 97-day 48,280km flight across 26 countries in a Robinson R-44, with co-pilot Quentin Smith, was blessed with good weather. The pair dodged an Arabian sandstorm and two Bangladeshi cyclones, and in August 1997 they landed triumphantly back in London.
The flight was the first of four major adventures for Murray. Three years later, she became the first person - man or woman - to fly around the world without autopilot, a handicap that made the journey more risky than any previous attempt. In 2001 she and co-pilot Colin Bodill came third in the historic London-to-Sydney air race. The fourth adventure, again with Bodill, began in Washington on October 22 last year: an attempt to become the first helicopter pilots to circumnavigate the globe via both poles, a 50,000km journey scheduled to take six months.