WHEN courageous Carol Fearn, of York, takes to the skies she won't just be defeating a lifelong fear of flying.

For Carol will be literally flying blind when she takes control of a motorised glider on Thursday.

Carol, who lost her sight in 1995, is making it a sponsored flight as a way of saying thank you to those who have supported her since then.

The 51-year-old woman from Burton Stone Lane wants to raise as much cash as she can to be shared between the Huntington Road Day Centre, which she has attended for the last four years, and other organisations which help blind and partially-sighted people.

"I want to do it because I want to put something back into the centre, because they help me a lot," she said.

Carol, who lost over two stone earlier this year, said: "If I can go through that for myself I wanted to do something else for somebody else."

She was persuaded to try flying by her cousin, Christine Gourlay, whose partner Barry McVeighty, is part of a syndicate which owns a glider based at Rufforth Airfield.

Carol has always been afraid of flying, and her first time up in an aircraft came after she tried the feel of the controls of a glider at the airfield, and the pilot decided to give her a preparatory flight as well.

"I was terrified at first," she said. "But it was an experience for me."

Barry said that for her sponsored flight she would be taken up by an experienced pilot and would take the controls when she had reached sufficient height.

The two-seater, dual control glider she would use had a 54ft wing span and cruised at about 120 knots.

PICTURE: FINGERS CROSSED: Carol Fearn tries out the cockpit with pilot Mike Cohler at Rufforth in advance of her fundraising flight Picture: Paul Baker