Amy Johnson

Amy Johnson-Mollison CBE (born July 1, 1903 in Hull (Yorkshire) , † January 5, 1941 ) is the most famous British female pilot . In 1930 she was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia .

Life

Amy Johnson (around 1930)

Amy Johnson was an avid athlete, played hockey and cricket . At the age of 14, she lost several front teeth to a cricket ball. Since she came from a poor family - her father was a successful fishmonger - the family could afford expensive dentists and Amy received good dentures. Even so, she felt disfigured and her confidence suffered as a result. This is widely believed to be the cause of the depression and hypersensitivity that she later suffered from.

Amy Johnson graduated from the University of Sheffield . After her Bachelor of Arts , she went to London, where the shy young woman took a job as a secretary and later in an advertising agency. In the winter of 1928/29 she began her flying lessons at the London Airplane Club . An hour was £ 5, which was her weekly wage. She made her first solo flight on June 9, 1929, and obtained her pilot's license in August. In contrast to other pilots of her time, Amy Johnson was also interested in mechanics and maintained and repaired her machines herself. Since her job as a secretary did not satisfy her, she immediately agreed when the head of airport mechanics wanted to hire her as an apprentice mechanic. As the first woman in Great Britain, she passed her aircraft mechanic exam in December 1929 . Her dream was to become a professional pilot - at the time, however, nobody trusted a woman's flying skills.

Flight to Australia in 1930

Stopover in India

The rose variety named 'Amy Johnson' by the Australian rose breeder Alister Clark in 1931

Thanks to the financial support of her father, she was able to quit her job as a secretary and take the exams required for the B license (private pilot) in peace. To gain recognition, she planned something spectacular: She wanted to fly solo to Australia and beat Bert Hinkler's 1928 record of 15½ days. With her father's money, she bought a single-engine Gypsy Moth from de Havilland , painted it green and named the machine on display in the London Science Museum after the name of her father's company, Jason . Competition for sponsors for daring aviation ventures was extremely tough in the late 1920s and early 1930s. After much effort and setbacks, the British oil entrepreneur Lord Wakefield finally showed himself willing to take on half the costs and provide fuel at the stage stops. Amy Johnson meticulously prepared her flight. On May 5, 1930, she took off from Croydon Airport in her Gypsy Moth . Since she was still completely unknown at the time, only her father and a few fellow pilots were present at the start - the press did not want to know about the inexperienced pilot, whose longest distance had been 237 km from London to Kingston upon Hull .

In retrospect, Johnson wrote that she was very naive and vastly underestimated the dangers of the adventure. From London to Istanbul there were no problems. In her log book, Amy Johnson only complained about the gasoline fumes flowing from the auxiliary tanks that were installed in place of the passenger seat. On the third day after the start, she encountered the first serious challenge: The Taurus Mountains were 3600 m high, while her heavily loaded machine could only climb up to 3300 m safely. After carefully searching around in the fog finally found the railway line of the Baghdad railway , where they flew along before finally relieved in Syrian Aleppo landed.

The next stage was supposed to take her to Baghdad , but shortly before the finish she got caught in a sandstorm . Johnson saw nothing, and her Gypsy Moth was not equipped to fly blind. The wind drove her into the desert. Finally, for safety reasons, she landed in the middle of the desert, hoping not to get into deep sand. After three hours of waiting, the storm subsided and she was able to fly on. In Baghdad, she no longer had the strength to carry out the maintenance work herself, and was overjoyed when her mechanic at Imperial Airways took the job off.

When she arrived in Karachi the next day, she had already undercut the Australian aviation pioneer Bert Hinkler by two days. The "flying secretary" was suddenly known, and the press tore over reports about her flight. On her arrival in Allahabad, for example, she was very surprised to be received by a group of journalists. In Rangoon , when landing in the pouring rain, she had problems with the soft ground, brushed against a post, and the Gypsy Moth did a headstand (" Fliegerdenkmal "). Propellers and wings were damaged, Amy Johnson was devastated. It was only thanks to the helpfulness of the students at the Rangoon Polytechnic who helped her with the repairs that she was able to fly on two days later.

From Rangoon the route went to Singapore . Over the sea between Singapore and Java , she was caught again in a storm from which she could not get out for six hours. When she arrived in Java, she had to make another emergency landing because of the wings damaged in the storm. In the absence of any other material, she repaired the torn fabric with tape. After Java, the Timor Sea , feared by all pilots, lay before her: 800 km above the water. In order not to fall asleep, she sang until she reached Melville Island , off the Australian continent .

Amy Johnson landed in Darwin on May 24th without any further problems . The flight had taken her four days longer than Bert Hinkler. Nevertheless, this flight made her a star among the female aviators. Two hits were even composed in her honor: in Australia the song Johnnie's in Town (Johnnie was her nickname) and in England the song Amy, wonderful Amy . Back in England she was by King George V with the Order of the British Empire awarded. The shy Amy Johnson was passed from hand to hand to receive gifts and honors, give lectures and write reports. Soon the hype became too much for her. When she learned from her father that he had an exclusive contract with the Daily Mail on her behalf , she had a nervous breakdown .

London – Tokyo, 1931

Amy Johnson took off into the air. For January 1931 she planned to fly from London via Siberia to the Republic of China . In her hurry to get away from England as soon as possible, she started poorly prepared and her Gypsy Moth Jason III. already broke in Warsaw when it touched down too hard on landing.

She wasn't put off by the failure. In July 1931 she flew with the mechanic Jack Humphreys in a De Havilland DH.80 Puss Moth from London to Tokyo in ten days , breaking the existing record for the 16,000 km long route. In Hailar on the Mongolian border, she narrowly missed the German Marga von Etzdorf , who was also on her way to Tokyo. The team was received with great enthusiasm in Tokyo.

The “flying lovers”, 1932–1938

Amy and Jim Mollison (1932),
photograph by Alexander Bassano

Back in England it was unusually quiet around Amy Johnson. A previously unknown Scottish pilot named James "Jim" Allan Mollison had covered "her" Australian route in just 9 days and overtook her rank. She met Jim Mollison personally in South Africa in June 1932 , where she was recovering from a solo flight from London to Cape Town . Jim flew the same route, beating the existing record. The two successful pilots were impressed by each other when they first met, and a few weeks later Jim Amy proposed marriage at the next meeting in London. The British press celebrated the wedding of two of their darlings in July 1932. Immediately after the wedding, Amy Johnson-Mollison undercut her husband's record on the London – Cape Town route.

From 1933 on, the two flew together. In July 1933 they planned a flight from Wales to New York and via Baghdad back to Great Britain. The flight across the Atlantic took over 29 hours and Jim Mollison, who was behind the wheel, had to make an emergency landing in Bridgeport , Connecticut . The machine came up badly on the runway that was too short and landed in a swamp - both the pilot and co-pilot were only slightly injured, but the aircraft was destroyed. So the flight was over after the first big stage. Jim returned to England frustrated, while Amy stayed in the US giving lectures to at least recoup some of the high cost of the expedition. In the course of this lecture tour she was received by Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt , where she met Amelia Earhart .

Together, the Mollisons took part in the MacRobertson air race from England to Australia in the fall of 1934 . During this race, they beat the non-stop record from Mildenhall to Karachi , a distance that took them just 22 hours in their De Havilland Comet . On the stage to Allahabad they vanished and had to give up with an engine failure.

In the years that followed, there were more and more scandalous stories about Mollison's alcohol and excess women in the press. In 1938 the Mollisons were divorced and Amy reverted to her maiden name. She only flew as a hobby and wrote articles about her experiences as a pilot.

World War II ATA pilot - Amy Johnson's last flight

When World War II broke out, Amy Johnson registered as a pilot with the RAF , but was turned down because of her gender and ended up flying for the Air Transport Auxiliary , a group of experienced pilots who were not eligible for the RAF and therefore transport and supply flights for the RAF took over. Around a hundred British female pilots were on duty there, and Amy Johnson used her prominence to protest the poorer pay and prejudice against female pilots. Her ex-husband Mollison was also flying at the ATA at the time.

On January 5, 1941 Amy Johnson was to transfer a twin-engine Airspeed Oxford Mk. II from Prestwick to Kidlington near Oxford alone . At noon it took off in stormy weather, but never arrived at its destination. To this day there are mysteries surrounding their disappearance, but enough facts are now available to be able to reconstruct their last flight with some reliability. After that, Amy Johnson's final hours probably went like this:

The flight turned out to be more difficult than expected due to bad weather. Amy Johnson had stopped near Blackpool to visit her sister Molly, who lived there. Before she started again, she is said to have said that she would “go all the way to the top”. This meant that she wanted to rise above the clouds because of the weather conditions. However, this was probably not possible, and she had to stay under the cloud cover, which led to the machine icing up and ultimately to the decision to abandon the machine and parachute it.

Circumstances suggest that Amy was disoriented. So she probably assumed she had land under her when she discovered tethered balloons . Presumably, because of their height, she thought these were part of the balloon barriers around London. Instead, however, the aircraft was near the Thames estuary, precisely at a point where a special ship, a so-called balloon carrier, had unfortunately hit a mine days earlier. The remaining five balloon carriers in the area had been evacuated as a result of this incident, and the balloons on these ships were now not at the required height, which ultimately led to Johnson's error.

It can be assumed that the pilot flew the machine, which still had enough fuel on board, out into the open sea to prevent a crash over land. So she trimmed the plane for level flight before opening the cargo hatch to parachute out .

It is almost certain that the person hanging on a parachute who was spotted by crew members of the steamship HMS Haslemere on January 5, 1941 at around 3:30 p.m. , was Amy Johnson. She was followed by an airplane that tipped sideways and fell down into the water.

Shortly afterwards, the parachute was also in the ice-cold water. The ship's captain jumped overboard, but his rescue attempt was unsuccessful; the person on the parachute was last seen disappearing under the stern of the ship. The captain died a few hours later as a result of the hypothermia that he suffered during the rescue attempt.

On the basis of debris that were later found, the crashed machine could be identified as the Oxford flown by Amy Johnson.

There were many rumors that Johnson was involved in a secret mission and carried passengers. The reason were testimonies who claim to have seen a second person swimming in the water. However, it can be assumed that it was the wooden hatch that was torn off when it was opened. Probably due to the missing hatch, the trim of the Oxford previously set by Amy Johnson was no longer effective, which explains the uncontrolled crash of the machine.

The statements of the crew of the HMS Haslemere also refute the version that Amy Johnson was killed by her own plane while floating in the water.

Amy Johnson's remains have never been found.

literature

• David Luff: Amy Johnson: Enigma in the Sky. The Crowood Press, 2002. ISBN 1-84037-319-9
• Gertrud Pfister: Flies - your life . The first female pilots. Orlanda, Berlin 1989. ISBN 3-922166-49-0
• Tim Healey, Andreas Held (translator): Discoverer and adventurer. Row: Our 20th Century. Publisher Reader's Digest - The Best. Stuttgart 1999 ISBN 3870708301 (with numerous illustrations)

Web links

Commons : Amy Johnson  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

• Biography The Ninety-Nines (English)
• Amy Johnson , Science Museum (English)
• [1] Royal Air Force Museum , London (English)
• Photo gallery ( BBC Humberside ; English)
• Remembering the Hull born aviator Amy Johnson BBC , August 11, 2010
• Photographs by Amy Johnson in the National Portrait Gallery , London