Oh how I wish I'd been a member of this forum while all this was going on.
I confess that I was one of the LAA members who attended the meeting two and a half years ago and voted that the award be rescinded. TCT was not happy, she was very unhappy indeed and when the vote was under way she turned from the front row to glare at those of us who voted against her. Her little entourage of cravat-wearing gentlemen of a certain age (they looked like Tarquins to me) were this >< close to calling us cads, bounders and mountebanks. Oooooh, they were jolly batey.
We thought we'd seen the last of her but just like those things that won't flush she bobbed up again two years later. It's likely she was hoping to make the Homours List but with a scandal like this hanging over her she'd no chance. The fillum of her trip would also not sell so well if she went down in aviation history as a ****.
This time we were ready for her and a few of us spent a couple of months countering her claims in the media with emails and phone calls to editors, journos and presenters. There was no doubt they'd swallowed her story. She's a very good story teller if the audience knows ****-all about the subject. By contrast with her media love bomb I was present when she appeared as the surprise guest at a dinner where the audience were mainly pilots. Without exception they sat agog at her utter fiction of flying over the Dome On The Rock at 200' and listened incredulously to her stories of (for example) a "black air traffic controller" berating her for busting the zone at Victoria Falls and in a neighbouring country overflying the presidential palace despite it being in a Restricted Zone. When de-briefed and told what she had done wrong she claims to have said "You know what? If you wanna create an international incident go right ahead". Clearly strings were pulled to get her out of there. Later on in another country a similar thing happened however the crew of her support aircraft were not so lucky and were detained for several weeks.
One pilot was so nauseated by her utter bollocks he decided to leave. Unfortunately he was stuck in a corner of the room so he simply opened the window and climbed out.