Women in Aviation by Julian Hale

Women in Aviation by Julian Hale

Author:Julian Hale
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784423643
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-02-27T00:00:00+00:00


Jason lands at Port Darwin at the end of Johnson’s gruelling solo flight. At this moment, she became a celebrity – aviation would drive her on for the rest of her life.

Six hours after leaving Timor, Jason appeared over Darwin. As she landed, a reporter rushed towards the deafened aviator and asked, ‘Well, what shall I tell the dear old world?’ Before she could answer, the crowd surged forward, engulfing Jason and his tiny, exhausted pilot: like Amelia Earhart two years earlier, never again would Amy Johnson be able to go about unnoticed.

Johnson’s achievement caused an outbreak of euphoria around the world, which, in the twenty-first century, is difficult to appreciate. Despite her exhaustion, she was forced to make a tour of the major Australian cities in Jason, before she suffered a severe landing accident at Brisbane. After this mishap, she continued her tour as a passenger; one of her pilots was Jim Mollison, who asked her to dance with him at a ball in Sydney. Johnson was deluged with tributes: songs were written about her (including the famous ‘Amy, Wonderful Amy’), items of clothing were, briefly, named after her and women imitated her hairstyle. She received gifts and cheques, including one from the Daily Mail for £10,000, and even proposals of marriage. In Britain, she was presented with two new aircraft, which she named Jason II and Jason III.

Although ‘the British Girl Lindbergh’ had, overnight, become perhaps the world’s most famous aviator, she was aware that she was only as good as her last flight. A few months after her Australian adventure, she foolhardily announced she would fly from Britain across Russia to China, in the middle of winter. In the event, she crashed Jason III in Poland. She continued by train to Russia, where she was feted as a model for Soviet womanhood. She tried again later in 1931 in Jason II, a de Havilland Puss Moth, and flew with a mechanic all the way to Tokyo. This extraordinary accomplishment, which took only 10.5 days, was completely successful. The pair toured Japan before flying back to the UK. However, her triumph was negated by a record-breaking flight from Australia to the UK by another aviator: Jim Mollison.

Johnson met Mollison again while she was holidaying in South Africa, where he had crash-landed at the end of a record-breaking flight from London to Cape Town. Four days after she arrived back in the UK on 4 May 1932, they became engaged, when Mollison proposed to her over lunch at Quaglino’s, a fashionable London restaurant. He later wrote:

In Australia she was the ex-typist who had become a famous pilot – a person whose hair became windblown; whose nails got dirty; and who often smells of petrol…Now, across a red-lighted luncheon of the choice foods and white linen, she smiled back at me, a manicured, powdered, waved blonde.

They were married later the same year.

Amelia Earhart’s solo transatlantic flight quashed Johnson’s own plans in that direction. Instead, she decided to try to break Jim’s London–Cape Town record.



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