When Amy Johnson took off from Croydon on 5 May 1930 bound for Australia, she had held a pilot’s licence for ten months and had never flown further than from London to Hull. Her aircraft was a second-hand de Havilland Gipsy Moth with an open cockpit and no radio.

Nineteen and a half days later she landed at Darwin, the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia, and one of the most famous people in Britain.

The record she did not break

It is worth being accurate about this, because the myth is more common than the fact. Amy Johnson set out to beat Bert Hinkler’s solo England-to-Australia time of just under fifteen and a half days, set in 1928.

For a while she was going to do it. She reached India on 11 May, six days out, which was ahead of Hinkler’s pace and a record for that leg on its own. Then a storm forced her down in Burma, where she broke the propeller and holed a wing, and the repairs cost her the schedule. She arrived at Darwin around four days behind Hinkler’s mark.

What she had done instead was fly, alone, in an aeroplane with a cruising speed of about 80 mph, across Europe, the Middle East, India and the Timor Sea, navigating with a compass and a map. That she was the first woman to do it is the headline. That she did it at all, with that experience, in that machine, is the actual story.

What she did next

The Australia flight made her a celebrity, which she did not much enjoy, and it did not slow her down. In July 1931 she flew London to Moscow in a single day and carried on to Tokyo. In 1932 she took the solo London to Cape Town record, beating the time set by her husband, the Scottish pilot Jim Mollison, whom she had married that year.

They flew together too, with mixed results: in 1933 the pair crossed the Atlantic from Pendine Sands and crash-landed short of their destination at Bridgeport, Connecticut, both injured. In 1936 she went back to Africa and took the Cape record again. The marriage ended in divorce in the late 1930s, and she reverted to her own name.

5 January 1941

By 1940 she was a First Officer in the Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying aircraft around Britain. On 4 January 1941 she left Prestwick in an Airspeed Oxford bound for RAF Kidlington, night-stopping at Blackpool with her sister. She was advised the following morning not to fly — thick cloud, snow. She is said to have replied that she would find her way by smell.

Some hours later, a convoy in the Thames Estuary watched a parachute come down and an aircraft circle into the sea. Lieutenant Commander Walter Fletcher, captain of HMS Haslemere, went into the water after her. He died of exposure days afterwards and was awarded a posthumous Albert Medal.

Her body was never recovered. Her flight bag, logbook and cheque book washed up. She is commemorated on the Runnymede memorial.

What actually happened has never been settled. The RAF Museum’s view is that she most likely ran out of fuel and took to her parachute. Some witnesses reported a second body in the water. And in 1999 a former anti-aircraft gunner made a claim that has hung over the story ever since.

Five days before she died she wrote a New Year letter to her friend Caroline Haslett, the founding secretary of the Women’s Engineering Society, of which Johnson had been president. It is the last letter of hers we have.

She recorded her voice in Sydney a few days after landing in 1930. It is worth hearing what she actually sounded like.

Newsreel of her return to Croydon in August 1930:

And the Science Museum on Jason, which is still in their collection:

Sources: RAF Museum, "Wonderful Amy!" archive exhibition; Science Museum Group Collection; Commonwealth War Graves Commission; contemporary reporting in The Scotsman and the Express & Star.