Bushire, on the Persian Gulf, December 1931. An American pilot is working on his biplane when a battered Ford rolls out of the desert. In it, half-buried in dust, is a young woman looking for a mechanic. Her own aircraft is stranded up the coast with a broken undercarriage. She is German, she is 24, and she is flying from Berlin to Australia on her own.

Her name was Elly Beinhorn. The American was Moye Stephens, flying around the world with the travel writer Richard Halliburton, and their meeting became a chapter in Halliburton's bestseller The Flying Carpet. By the time Beinhorn got home, she had crossed Asia, reached Australia and flown through South America, becoming one of the most famous pilots in Germany.

Her story is also a complicated one. Her greatest fame came in the 1930s, when the Nazi regime was keen to use celebrated aviators, and she married a racing driver the regime turned into a national hero. Here is what she flew, and what historians make of the rest.

From Hanover to Berlin-Staaken

Elly Beinhorn was born in Hanover on 30 May 1907. In 1928 she heard a lecture by Hermann Köhl, who had just flown the Atlantic from east to west, and decided she would fly. Against her parents' wishes, and with a small inheritance, she moved to Berlin and took lessons at Staaken airfield, earning her licence in 1929.

Money was the problem from the start. To pay for flying she gave aerobatic displays at weekends, which kept her in the air but bored her. What she really wanted was distance.

ZDF's Terra X History (in German) on Germany's best-known women pilots of the 1930s, including Elly Beinhorn, and how their careers unfolded under the Nazi regime.

Germany at the time had a small but famous group of women pilots, among them Marga von Etzdorf and Thea Rasche. Long-distance flights made headlines, and headlines brought sponsors. Beinhorn set out to earn hers.

Africa, 1931: a camel ride into Timbuktu

Her first big flight began on 4 January 1931. She flew a small Klemm monoplane from Berlin via Spain and Morocco down the West African coast to Portuguese Guinea, now Guinea-Bissau, where she joined a scientific expedition. On the way back, her engine failed and she came down in swampland in the Niger region, short of Timbuktu.

She walked away unhurt. Halliburton, who heard the story from locals in Timbuktu soon afterwards, wrote that a broken oil pipe had caused the crash and that she rode into the town's market place on a camel, still in her flying clothes. She salvaged what she could from the aircraft and made her way back to Berlin, where she landed at Tempelhof on 29 April 1931 to a hero's welcome.

The flight made her famous in Germany almost overnight. It also gave her the confidence, and the publicity, to try something much bigger.

Around the world, 1931 to 1932

On 4 December 1931, Beinhorn took off from Berlin-Staaken in another small Klemm, heading east. Her route took her through Budapest, Belgrade, Istanbul, Aleppo and Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. It was there, after a forced landing up the coast, that she turned up in Bushire looking for help and found Moye Stephens and Halliburton's Flying Carpet.

Halliburton recorded her introduction in his book: she was a German pilot on her way from Berlin to Australia, alone. Stephens flew her back to her stranded aircraft and helped repair it. The two crews then travelled on together across Persia and India, and Halliburton left no doubt about what he thought of her flying.

In India the three pilots performed at an air display in Calcutta in front of the Maharaja of Nepal, and Halliburton described Beinhorn putting on aerobatics almost as daring as Stephens's. Through his son, the old ruler gave them permission to fly towards Mount Everest, and the two aircraft set off together for the Himalayas.

They flew on together through South-East Asia. In Bangkok the King and Queen of Siam gave a party for her, and after a month together in Singapore the pilots finally went their separate ways. A note followed from Batavia, now Jakarta, which Halliburton printed in full.

From Java she island-hopped via Bali and Timor and crossed the Timor Sea to Darwin, arriving in March 1932. She was often described as the second woman, after Amy Johnson, to fly alone from Europe to Australia. She then flew south-east across Queensland, through Charleville to Brisbane.

In Brisbane she was presented to the Governor of Queensland at the opening of the William Jolly Bridge on 30 March 1932, before flying on to Sydney. Her journey was far from over.

Her Klemm was dismantled and shipped across the Pacific via New Zealand to Panama. There she reassembled it and flew down the west coast of South America, was decorated in Peru, crossed the Andes and reached Buenos Aires before shipping home to Germany. She was back in Berlin in the summer of 1932, after a journey that German accounts put at around 31,000 km.

Strictly, it was a round-the-world journey rather than a solo flight around the world: the oceans were crossed by ship, as was common at the time. The first woman to fly solo all the way around the globe was Jerrie Mock in 1964. But no one doubted the achievement. Beinhorn came home in debt and was awarded the Hindenburg Cup, worth 10,000 Reichsmarks, which let her keep flying. Her book Ein Mädchen fliegt um die Welt became a bestseller and appeared in English in 1935 as Flying Girl.

Africa again, and the Americas

In 1933 she flew a Heinkel He 71, a light single-seat cabin monoplane, from Berlin to Cape Town and back. It was the first year of Nazi rule, and the flight had a political edge: her book about it, 180 Stunden über Afrika, openly presented the trip as publicity for Germany in its former African colonies, according to German biographical accounts.

In 1934 and 1935 came a tour of the Americas in a Klemm Kl 32. She flew from Panama through Central America and Mexico, then across the United States, before returning to Germany by ship in January 1935.

The Bf 108 Taifun and her one-day records

Her next aircraft was a very different machine. The Messerschmitt Bf 108 was a fast, four-seat touring monoplane with retractable undercarriage that first flew in 1934. Beinhorn named her example Taifun, typhoon, and the name stuck to the whole type.

On 13 August 1935 she took off from Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia before dawn, flew to Istanbul, turning over the Asian shore of the Bosporus, and was back in Berlin that evening: about 3,470 km in a single day, from Europe to Asia and back. In 2010 Deutsche Post marked the 75th anniversary of the flight with a stamp.

A year later, in August 1936, she went further. She flew about 3,750 km from Damascus via Cairo to Berlin, touching Asia, Africa and Europe in a single day.

A surviving Messerschmitt Bf 108 Taifun, the type Beinhorn named, flying over the Swiss Alps.

Bernd Rosemeyer and a Nazi celebrity marriage

On 29 September 1935, on a lecture tour in Czechoslovakia, Beinhorn was invited by Auto Union to the Czechoslovakian Grand Prix in Brno. She congratulated the winner, a young driver named Bernd Rosemeyer. They married on 13 July 1936, and Nazi propaganda made the most of them: the record-breaking aviator and the fearless racing driver.

Rosemeyer had become a member of the SS. Their son, Bernd, was born on 12 November 1937. Ten weeks later, on 28 January 1938, Rosemeyer was killed on the autobahn between Frankfurt and Darmstadt when his streamlined Auto Union was caught by a gust of wind during a speed record attempt.

Beinhorn reportedly asked for a simple, non-political funeral. Her wishes were ignored, and Nazi officials gave speeches at the graveside. Her memoir of her husband, Mein Mann, der Rennfahrer, published in 1938, became her best-selling book.

How to judge her Nazi-era career

German biographical accounts say Beinhorn never joined the Nazi party, and older portraits presented her as an apolitical sportswoman. More recent historians are less generous. Christoph Frilling, in a 2009 study of Beinhorn and Rosemeyer, found German-nationalist and at times racist attitudes in her writings and judged her a willing fellow traveller rather than a perpetrator.

Her flying itself is not in dispute. When war came, her Taifun was requisitioned by the Luftwaffe in 1939 and she largely stopped flying. In 1941 she married Karl Wittmann, a businessman, and their daughter Stefanie was born the following year.

Flying again, and a long life

After the war, powered flying was banned in Germany. Beinhorn flew gliders, then went to Switzerland, where she renewed her licence in 1951 and flew a Piper Cub as a reporter. She later presented television programmes and kept writing. In 1977 she published her autobiography, Alleinflug, meaning solo flight.

She voluntarily handed in her pilot's licence in 1979, at the age of 72. In 2014, German television dramatised her life in the film Elly Beinhorn: Alleinflug, with Vicky Krieps in the title role.

UFA Fiction's trailer for Elly Beinhorn: Alleinflug (2014), the German TV film about her life.

Elly Beinhorn died near Munich on 28 November 2007, aged 100, and was buried beside Bernd Rosemeyer in Berlin. She outlived almost everyone she had flown with. What remains is a set of flights that are hard to argue with, made by a young woman in an open-cockpit Klemm, and a reminder that the golden age of record flying was not lived outside politics.

Sources: Richard Halliburton (The Flying Carpet, 1932), State Library of Queensland (John Oxley Library), Wikipedia (English and German), Deutsche Aero Club (Pionierinnen der Lüfte), ZDF Terra X, New York Sun, GrandPrix.com, Christoph Frilling (Die Pilotin und der Rennfahrer, 2009)