I've followed this fascinating thread, mostly vicariously, although I seem to remember contributing at some stage.
I was at a loose-end this evening, so I thought I would use the Wayback Machine to look for early versions of TCT's website, searching for confirmation of Terry's "advertised in advance" claim.
What I found contradicts Terry's claim. Here's the text from the earliest archived version I could find (4 February 2015) of the Operations tab of the Bird in a Biplane website (my bold and blue re-colouring):
Tracey’s Africa flight saw her cover nearly 10,000 miles
from Cape Town to Goodwood in an open cockpit
vintage Boeing biplane, the Spirit of Artemis.
The 1942 Boeing Stearman was fully restored by 3G Classic Aviation in Hungary during
2012/13. It has a 300hp Lycoming 680 radial engine; is fitted with extra fuel tanks in the top
wing for increased endurance, has a top altitude of 10,000ft and a cruise speed of 95mph.
The Stearman was dismantled and shipped from Europe to South Africa in September 2013
and re-assembled in the Execujet facility at Cape Town International Airport, ready for take-off
at the beginning of November 2013.
The Cape Town to Goodwood flight took two months to complete with 38 stops. Tracey was
supported by a second aircraft; a Cessna Caravan provided by Phoenix Aviation of Nairobi,
which carried a logistics manager, an engineer and a four-man film crew.
In preparation for her solo flight across Africa, Tracey was invited to join a 3 man Russian crew
ferry flying an old piston engined Antonov 2 biplane from Kiev to Cape Town. The aeroplane
was donated by Utair for humanitarian work in South Africa and supported by ExecuJet.
The route took the crew across northern Europe and down through Spain over the Straits of
Gibraltar to Morocco; south through Algeria, Niger, Nigeria, Gabon, and on down the west
coast of Africa.
The flight arrived in Cape Town on 20th of February 2013 having taken three months to complete
the journey which covered over 20,000km over 15 different countries, used over 85kg of maps
and flight charts, and had two enforced halts over several weeks in Port Harcourt and Cabinda
with visa and fuel issues.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150204...om/operations/
The Cape to Goodwood flight took place in 2013, and the website was claiming it was a solo flight more than a year later, in 2015.
By the time of the next archived snapshot on 23 March 2015, the Operations tab is no longer present in the website's menu, but unfortunately for TCT's
PR team, the Operations HTML code, containing the same text, is still present in the archived versions of the website, until 8 June 2016, after which date, someone must have noticed and deleted it.
I would appreciate it if someone could check and confirm the dates. The way that the Wayback Machine website works is a bit confusing at times.