Elly Beinhorn, who died November 28 in Germany at 100, was a daring aviatrix who flew around the world in 1932, making headlines wherever she touched down. A free spirit who had announced to her incredulous parents at age 21 that solo flight was her dream, she had already survived a crash while flying from Berlin to Africa. Taureg tribesmen guided her to safety through the Sahara.

In 1936, she married Berndt Rosemeyer, the greatest German grand prix driver of the 1930s. Although she seemed fearless aloft, she was terrified by the speedy driving in difficult conditions that gave him his nickname of Nebelmeister (Fogmaster).

The glamorous couple was feted by the Nazis, who made Mr. Rosemeyer a captain in the SS. Of course no one knew what lay ahead: Beinhorn had been showered with affection by Americans a year earlier as she toured the country in a plane with a swastika emblazoned on the tail. Sadly, her husband was killed in 1938 while trying to set a speed record.

Only 24 in 1932, when she set out January 6 from Berlin in her one-engine Klemm monoplane, Beinhorn hopscotched her way through Turkey, Mesopotamia, and Iran, where she was grounded with mechanical problems. She sojourned at Calcutta, where the poet Rabindranath Tagore questioned her closely about aviation. She later put on a stunt-flying display for the Maharajah of Nepal, also in Calcutta on a visit. Beinhorn did a spin directly over the Maharajah’s head. From there, she flew near Mt. Everest and touched down near Darjeeling with a pair of American pilots, Richard Halliburton and Moye Stephens, who were on their own round-the-world trip in a Stearman C-3B dubbed the Flying Carpet.

Beinhorn had to stop each night in her open-cockpit Klemm as she journeyed east to Bangkok and Indonesia. Finally, she flew across the Timor Sea in a storm to Port Darwin to become, after Amy Johnson, only the second woman ever to fly from Europe to Australia. After flying across the desert to Sydney, she dismantled the Klemm and took it to New Zealand in a crate — no way could the tiny plane make it across the vast stretches of the Pacific — and then on to Panama City. By then it was spring, and on June 4 she put two oranges and a bottle of ginger ale in her pocket and took off toward Cali, Colombia, en route to circumaviating South America. The chief of the Peruvian Air Force decorated her with the country’s Aviation Cross. She then installed an oxygen system and braved the crossing of the Andes en route to Buenos Aires and then Bahia, where she put the Klemm back in a crate and sailed for Bremerhaven. In all, she logged nearly 20,000 miles over five continents. After she arrived in Berlin on June 26, she was awarded the Hindenburg Cup, then Germany’s highest civilian aviation award. She may have been the most famous woman in the country.

Born May 30, 1907, in Hanover, the daughter of a prosperous industrialist, Beinhorn used a small inheritance to take flying lessons in 1928, and quickly began supporting her hobby through aerobatic barnstorming. In those days long distance flights were done with maps and a compass. In 1931 she made her first significant long solo flight, to Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea Bissau) in West Africa, in support of a German scientific expedition. It was then that an oil leak caused her to crash in the Sahara. Helped by tribesmen, she hiked 30 miles through the desert to Timbuktu.

After 1936, when she married Rosemeyer, Beinhorn cut back on her flying odysseys. Rosemeyer told her he found her absences nerve-wracking. She wrote in a memoir that the decision was easy, as he was a more talented driver than she was pilot. She attended every race, sometimes giving his oil-drenched overalls a quick wash in pure gasoline.

They honeymooned by crossing Africa in her closed-cockpit Messerschmitt Bf 108 that she named Taifun (Typhoon). That summer, the Rosemeyers sailed for New York, where Bernd won the 300-mile Vanderbilt Cup race, run at Roosevelt Raceway at Westbury. His average speed in his Auto-Union was a torrid 82.564 mph. The first thing he did on emerging from his car was to have his wife paged over the loudspeaker.

The couple had a son, Bernd Jr., in November of 1937. Just two months later, Rosenmeyer’s speedy experimental racer veered off a test track into a woods. He was thrown from the car and killed.

Beinhorn wrote a memoir of their life together, “Mein Mann der Rennfahrer” (Racedriver). She also wrote “Flying Girl” (1935), and “Ich fliege um die Welt” (1952).

She continued flying, and in 1939 was turned back in Bangkok while trying to reach Japan, which was already at war. It was her last great adventure.

Beinhorn married a physician in 1941, and the couple had a daughter. After the war, during a period when Germans were banned from having airplanes, she took up gliding, then moved to Switzerland where she could continue to fly. She wrote about aviation for European publications. In 1952, she flew a Piper Cub to Benghazi in Libya. In 1959, she returned to America to fly in the Powder Puff Derby, the annual women’s transcontinental race. Her Piper Comanche was turned back over Drummond, Mont., by thunderstorms. Newspapers of the day called her “the Amelia Earhart of Germany.”

She finally turned in her pilot’s license at age 72.