Interesting stuff,
Flying Goat, and fair comment as a general rule.
When the documentary of her journey from Cape Town to Goodwood was first shown on BBC4, many of us watched it with no little enthusiasm (bar a few nit-picks, perhaps) and one of our regulars started a thread in the AH&N forum of PPRuNe in some praise of it:
http://www.pprune.org/aviation-histo...ml#post8906270
It wasn't until post #17 in that thread that Sam Rutherford brought us down to earth by calling into question the claim on her website and elsewhere that she had flown solo. I'm not sure his first post quite sunk in with all of us.
Talking of crowd behaviour brings to mind the old nursery tale about the King's new suit of clothes. No one dares call his bluff, and there's much sycophantic praise at his sartorial good taste. When someone eventually announces that he is indeed stark naked, however, there follows a wave of either anger or great merriment - or perhaps a combination of both. Meanwhile, the flunkies try to shut up the whistle-blowers with various threats, simultaneously putting as positive a spin on the matter as possible to the public.