ROMANTIC CAREER

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 122, 26 May 1930, Page 9

ROMANTIC CAREER

SOARING INTO FAME

DESERVED SUCCESS

British Official Wireless. (Eoceived 26th May{ 11 a.m.)

BUGBY, 21th May

Miss Amy Johnson, who reached Port Darwin, Australia, to-day, having safely covered the dangerous five hundred miles stage across the sea from Atamboea, left Croydon on sth May. She has thus completed in twenty days a wonderful solo flight of approximately 10,400 miles over a route which has presented almost every variety of difficulty which tho aviator can encounter, including fog, tropical rainstorms, snow-capped mountain ranges, arid deserts, and long sea flights.

Miss Amy Johnson is twenty-two, and she took her first flying lesson eighteen months ago. After leaving Sheffield University, where- she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree, she took up secretarial work in the office of a Lon-. don solicitor. A visit to Stag Lane aerodrome aroused her ambitions to fly, and she arranged to have lessons, showing from' the first remarkable aptitude. Not content with obtaining a pilot's licence, she studied engineering, and was the first air woman to become a qualified ground engineer. Her longest flight before the one just completed was from London to her nativo town of Hull, a distanco of 147 miles, and her actual flying life was only ninety hours.

Consequently, when she coneoived 'the idea of flying to Australia, the experts she approached for advice and assistance mostly provided discouragement and warnings. She was bo persistent, however, th&i he* father

enabled her to buy the second-hand machine somo years old in winch Gaptain Hope, tho well-known airman, had already flown thirty-five thousand miles in Africa and elsewhere. But it was a good machine, ono of tho famous Dc Haviland Moth light 'planes with a 100 horse-power Gipsy engine. Innally, the oil and petrol companies, probably more out of good nature than in any expectation that sho would got far, promised her help along the route. THE WOKLD AWAKES. Thus on sth May, with a spare propeller strapped on her little machine, with the passenger's seat filled with extra petrol storage, she waved her hand to her father and set oft' alone for Australia. She reached Vienna, her first stopping place, 750 miles distant, in one hop—a good effort. Theneo on successive stages she flew to Constantinople, Aleppo, Bagdad, Bandar Abbas, and Karachi. But it was only when slid arrived m India on the sixth day, two days under tho time made by Mr. Bert Hinkler'. on his fifteen and "a half days' record flight to Australia, that tho newspapers awoke to tho fact that this girl, unknown to the public a week before, was an airwoman of quite exceptional mettle. She had then made a difficult (light across Anatolia and over the 8000 ft high Taurus Mountains, and amid storms and dense clouds, had effected a landing on her way to Bagdad in a blinding sandstorm, and had gone on again and had kept going in conditions of intense heat. Violeut monsoon weather was encountered on the way to Rangoon, and in landing on a field nearby tho 'plane encountered' a concealed ditch. The damage done involved three days' delay and spoiled her chances of beating Hinkler 's record. - She flew to Bangkok in torrents of rain, and from there to Singora ihe mist was so thick that she had to fly along the winding coast only a few feet above the sea. On later stages sho -benefited by tho hospitality and assistance of tho Dutch authorities, who were as anxious as her own countrymen that the superb adventure should end with the success it has achieved. Appropriately enough it was ended on Empire Day.