Born: 1 July 1903, United Kingdom
Died: 5 January 1941
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Mrs J. A. Mollison
Amy Johnson CBE was a pioneering English aviator, and the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia over 19.5 days in May 1930, doing so with little flying experience at the time (she had only received her license in 1929).
She set many long-distance records throughout the 1930s, across Europe and to Moscow and Tokyo. In 1931 she married fellow aviator James Mollison and quickly broke his record for flying from England to South Africa. In 1936, she broke the record again, flying 22,530 kilometers in 12 days. The couple flew the Atlantic together in July 1933, but crashed on landing at Bridgeport, Connecticut.. Johnson and Mollison made it as far as India during the 1934 MacRobertson Race from England to Australia, and divorced soon after. Johnson flew military missions during World War II as a part of the Air Transport Auxiliary and died during a ferry flight.
The following is republished with permission from Magnificent Women in Engineering and was written by Nina C. Baker.
Probably the best known of all the presidents of the Women’s Engineering Society, both at the time and also long after her untimely death, Amy Johnson was born in 1903 in Yorkshire into a prosperous fish merchant’s family. Her father, John William Johnson, was a devoted supporter of his daughter’s aviation exploits, including financially. She went to an ordinary municipal secondary school in Hull and then graduated in economics from the University of Sheffield. Johnson stood out from the crowd during her school days, and continued to do so when gaining a degree in Economics from Sheffield University. Johnson discovered her passion for flying at London Aeroplane Club, Stag Lane Aerodrome achieving her full pilot’s licence and the Air Ministry’s ground-engineer’s licence in 1929, being the first woman to get the latter. 1930 was remarkable for her record-breaking solo flight from England to Australia, and in 1931 the Society of Engineers presented her with the President ‘s Gold Medal for her paper on “The Attention that I gave to Jason’s engine during my flight ,” which was described as ”a classic in Engineering”. In 1932 she married Scottish pilot Jim Mollison, who had proposed to her during a flight together some eight hours after they had first met. They made a number of high profile flights together before their divorce in 1938. In 1940, like many other women pilots who were WES members, Johnson joined the newly formed Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), and rose to First Officer, but on 5th January 1941, while flying an Airspeed Oxford for the ATA from Prestwick via Blackpool to RAF Kidlington near Oxford, she went off course in adverse weather conditions. Reportedly out of fuel, she bailed out as her aircraft crashed into the Thames Estuary near Herne Bay and died.
Amy joined the Women’s Engineering Society in 1930 and was immediately being frequently featured in The Woman Engineer every year until her death. In 1932, having set up the society’s Aeronautical Section, which was to be the forerunner of the British Women Pilots’ Association, Amy became one of the society’s vice presidents from 1934-37 was president for an exceptional three years, during which time she was included (with Verena Holmes) in the Jubilee Pageant painting – an enormous panorama of the most significant people and events of the age, for the Ideal Homes Exhibition. Her death was a great loss to the Society which held a big memorial service at St Martins in the Fields, London, raised funds for a scholarship fund for women to train in aeronautics and for a bronze bust which was gifted to the city of Hull and is in their Streetlife Museum.