The Duchess of Bedford disappeared during a solo flight over the Wash on 22 March 1937 and was never found.
On 22 March 1937, the Duchess of Bedford, then 71 years old, took off alone from Woburn Abbey aerodrome in her Gipsy Moth aircraft for what was intended to be a routine solo flight. She never returned. Search efforts located wreckage of her aircraft in the Wash, the large tidal bay on the east coast of England, but her body was never recovered.
Her disappearance shocked Britain and brought to a close a remarkable life that had spanned nursing, ornithology, philanthropy, and record-breaking aviation. Despite her age and failing hearing — she had taken up flying partly as a personal challenge and a way to cope with encroaching deafness — she had continued to fly regularly, and was, at the time of her death, one of the oldest active pilots in Britain, male or female.
The Duchess's death was widely mourned, and her life was celebrated as an example of defying convention and age-based limitations. She had already achieved fame for her long-distance flights to India and South Africa, and her tragic disappearance over the Wash became the final, poignant chapter of a career that had seen her transform from a Victorian clergyman's daughter into one of interwar Britain's most admired and unconventional public figures.