Amy Johnson crossed nearly 1000 miles on 22 May 1930 during one leg of her history-making, solo flight from England to Australia. Though the day’s flight had been uneventful, she began to get edgy when the sun went down while she was flying over a large expanse of water between the islands of Flores and Timor in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Her fuel was almost gone, when Amy finally sighted Timor and began to look for the island’s aerodrome at Atamboea. ‘I just couldn’t see it,’ she later wrote. Despairing, she flew lower and lower until she spied a bumpy, grassy clearing.

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Upon landing, she realized the bumps were a range of anthills, and nearby stood a small village of mud and straw huts. As soon as she came to a halt, ‘a horde of yelling natives, with hair flying in the wind, and knives in their hands or between their red-stained teeth’ rushed from the village and surrounded the plane and Amy. She reached for her revolver, but after a brief council among the village leaders, the headman approached and made her understand that they would take her to a ‘pastor.’ Figuring this to mean a resident missionary and too weary to protest, she allowed them to lead her into the forest.

Eventually they came to a large, wooden building where the missionary kindly offered her a meal of cheese and wine. Not long after, officials from the Atamboea aerodrome drove up; they had seen her plane approach and miss the aerodrome because a recent brushfire had made it indistinguishable from the air. As harrowing as that day had been, it was only one among many during that historic flight.

* * *

In 1930 Amy Johnson was a slender blue-eyed girl that stood 5 feet, 4 inches tall with wavy light brown hair that she wore in a bob. She was attractive, but self-conscious about her false front teeth, which she wore because a cricket ball had knocked out her own teeth she was 14.

Amy was born on 1 July 1903, the eldest of John and Amy Johnson’s four daughters. Though not wealthy, her family was well off, as Mr. Johnson presided over the prosperous family fishing business. Amy grew up in Hull Yorkshire, but she wasn’t the typical English Rose. She preferred boys’ games and loved to compete. But after the cricket ball accident, boys teased her and she reacted by becoming ‘introspective and withdrew farther and farther into a protective shell of my own making.’

In the autumn of 1922 Amy headed for Sheffield to attend university. She graduated three years later with a bachelor’s degree in economics. Afterward, she returned to Hull and worked brief, unsatisfactory stints at two local offices. Then in March 1927 she moved to London for a fresh start.

With only a little money from her father to start, Amy moved into a YWCA hostel and began to look for work. She took a brief job as a shop girl before starting work on 11 April for £3 a week as a secretary at the law office of Messers William Charles Crocker. Initially, she found the work so satisfying and performed so well, that the firm’s partners considered training her as a solicitor.

Things went well for Amy until about a year later, when she decided to take up flying. Her first enquires put her off the idea because of the expense. Then on 28 April she took a bus ride to the Stag Lane Aerodrome on a whim. There she learned that she could join the club and learn to fly at a fraction of the cost put to her by the local flying school. However, the club had a five-month waiting list, which Amy tried unsuccessfully to circumvent by appealing to the club’s secretary.

Amy finally took to the air for her first 30-minute lesson on 15 September 1928. She flew in a dual-controlled Cirrus II Moth, with tandem cockpits, and it was a disaster. Her helmet didn’t fit properly, so she couldn’t hear her tutor’s instructions over the earphones. As Amy later recalled, ‘When I was up in the air I could only hear a confused sound in my neck instead of what should have been lucid instructions . . . I was scared stiff of my instructor who never seemed to lose his first idea that I was a born idiot.’

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