Amy Johnson was the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia. Flying in the same period as aviation pioneers such as Amelia Earhart, Bessie Coleman. Amy Johnson pushed the boundaries of flight throughout the 1930s.
Amy Johnson was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1903 and was one of the most influential women of her era. An aviation pioneer, throughout the 1930s Johnson became globally celebrated for setting numerous international records for long distance flying.
The eldest of four sisters, Johnson gained an economics degree before moving to London to work as a secretary.
In July 1929, Johnson would gain her pilot’s licence just days after after her 27th birthday and in the same year she became the first British woman to obtain a ground engineer's "C" licence. Less than a year later, Johnson gained international fame, when in May 1930, she flew a Gipsy Moth plane 11,000 miles to become the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia.
The crossing made headlines across the globe and Johnson became an instant global celebrity. In a statement to the press, Johnson had admitted to carrying a shealth knife during the flight in case she had crashed in the sea and needed to protect herself from sharks. The solo flight had meant that Johnson landed for fuel and repairs in places such as Vienna, Constantinople, Calcutta, Bagdad, Bangkok, Singapore, and on her arrival in Australia she was hailed as a hero in the national press. Later that year Johnson was awarded a CBE by George V for the flight.
A year later, in July 1931, Johnson, alongside her co-pilot, became the first person to fly from London to Moscow in a single day. She then continued her flight from Moscow, over SIberia, to Tokyo, and in doind so set a new record speed for a flight between Britain and Japan.
Throughout the 1930s Johnson continued to set speed records. In 1932, only two years after obtaining her pilot’s licence, Johnson set a new speed record for flying solo from London to Cape Town. Marrying a fellow pilot, Jim Mollison, Johnson began to fly as a couple, achieving new speed records for travelling from Britain to India and to South Africa. Such was the celebrity of Johnson, that, when in 1933 an attempted record flight from Wales to New York ended in a plane crash, New York city through a ticker tape parade in her honour.
Johnson was to die in mysterious circumstances in 1941. Barred from flying as a combatant during the Second World War because she was a woman, Johnson was able to join the war effort, alongside a select number of female pilots, as pilots for the Air Transport Auxillary (ATA), a division which flew damaged and repaired military planes from factories to airfields. In 1943 female flyers in the ATA would become became the first women in the British government to recieve equal pay with their male colleagues. Tragically, however, Johnson would not be alive to see this happen, as she had mysteriously disappeared in January 1941 whilst transporting a plane. Recent letters have emerged to suggest that Johnson was shot down by British soldiers after she failed twice to give the proper identification passwords when flying over the Thames.
My print aims to celebrate the spirit of adventure and individual determination embodied by the aviation pioneer, Amy Johnson.