Amy Johnson the women of flying record Learn English through story level 3

amy johnson

the british woman who broke records

i was one of the first british

competitive

woman pilots and i broke

many flying records i became

very famous but an

accident during the second world war

ended my life at the age of 37.

[Music]

my parents lived in the city of hull in

england i was born there

on the 1st of july 1903.

the year of my birth was an important

one for aviation

before 1903 people had been able to fly

only in balloons and

airships airships were like balloons

with engines but in 1903

heavier than air airplanes flew for the

first time

those first airplanes didn’t fly very

far

and they flew in america and new zealand

far from our home in hull

but soon people in europe were building

successful airplanes too

in 1909 louis blerio

flew across the english channel

suddenly the world was getting smaller

my childhood was a happy one

my father was a businessman and my

family had a lot of money

after attending school in hull i studied

at sheffield university i enjoyed

the parties and the dances i enjoyed

playing sports

but i also enjoyed studying for an

economics degree

my ambition then was to become a

businesswoman

so when i left the university in 1925

i took some courses in business studies

these courses and my degree gave me the

skills to get a job in a financial

company

and i quickly found one i earned

one pound a week but i hated the job

and i soon left then

i fell in love for the first time

my parents didn’t like my boyfriend

they made me an offer they said

i could take a long holiday in canada

they wanted me to forget my boyfriend

i thought that they were wrong about him

so i didn’t accept their offer

i stayed in england but i soon decided

that my parents were right about my

boyfriend

i needed to start my life again

so i decided to leave the north of

england

and live in london

i found a job with a law company there

and i soon learned a lot about the law

i worked for that company for three

years

for three years i was the secretary of a

lawyer

called william crocker and for those

three years

my life was very conventional it was

exactly like the lies of most other

women from families like mine

then one day everything

changed for me the weather was good that

day

i decided to ride out of the city on a

bus

and then take a walk

soon i was walking past an airfield

a large sign told me that it belonged to

the london airplane club

suddenly i decided to find out about

this club

so i walked in and looked for someone to

talk to

i quickly discovered that all the

members of the club were men

they were surprised to see a woman when

i entered their club room

they were more surprised when i asked to

join their club

and to take flying lessons

as soon as my lessons began i knew that

i had found what i wanted

future was going to be in the air i had

to become a pilot

my first attempts at flying weren’t very

successful

my first teacher told me that i could

never become a pilot

but i didn’t give up my new ambition and

finally

i earned my license in july

by then i was very interested in

aeroplanes as machines

so i wanted a ground engineer’s license

too

i wanted to repair aircraft as well as

flying them

in december of the same year i earned a

license to work on engines

i was the first woman in britain to have

a ground

engineers license engineering

and flying were not careers for women in

1930

everyone said that and women didn’t

travel alone between countries

everyone said that too but my father was

an unusual man

and he didn’t share these opinions

when i told him that i wanted to do all

these things

he listened to me the help

that he gave me changed my life forever

to start my new life i needed an

aeroplane

my father and a friend of his gave me

some money

with this money i was able to buy a

second-hand gypsy moth

60g with a 100 horsepower engine

i named the little aeroplane jason

why because jason was the trademark of

my father’s business

so now i had my licenses

and an airplane i was ready to fly

the question was where could i fly to

short journeys in england were easy and

flying to france wasn’t difficult

i wanted to do something much more

difficult

so i decided to fly to australia on my

own

on the 5th of may 1930

i set out on my first solo flight

between continents

many people had warned me of the dangers

of my plan

they’d reminded me that i had only 75

hours

of flying experience they’d asked me a

lot of questions

how could i find airfields when i needed

to refuel

how could i fly without getting lost how

could i stay on my course when i was

tired and falling asleep

could i land my aeroplane in the dark

who could repair the airplane when it

was damaged

i wasn’t scared by these questions in

fact

they increased my wish to succeed

and when i left the ground on that day

in may i took only some simple maps with

me in the small cockpit of my aeroplane

my journey lasted 19 days

but nothing went seriously wrong i flew

over mountains and deserts i flew

through heavy rain and freezing cold

winds

and once i had to land in a sandstorm

i stopped to refuel in some very small

places

and the people in them had never seen an

aeroplane with a woman pilot

my route also allowed me refueling stops

at big british owned airfields in india

and singapore and finally

on the 24th of may jason arrived in the

australian city of

darwin

i had flown 18 600

kilometers the people of darwin were

surprised to see me

but they gave me a good welcome

i’d hoped to beat bert hinckler’s speed

record for an england to australia

solo flight but i’d been too slow

i hadn’t broken that record but i had

established a new one

i was the first woman to fly solo from

britain to australia

i was pleased about that and i was

pleased that the daily mail newspaper

had given me ten

thousand pounds to celebrate my flight

i’d established one new record

now i wanted to break some other records

and i became

very competitive a year after my

australian flight

i set off from london to fly to moscow

in russia

this time i wasn’t alone i had a

co-pilot

a man called jack humphries

we flew in a puss moth aeroplane it took

us 21 hours

to fly the distance of 2830 kilometers

this was the first time the flight had

been completed in less than a day

another new record

after a short rest we continued on

across siberia

this was a huge region with very few

people in it

we had to choose our stops carefully

between the tundra

and mountains and after siberia

we flew on to tokyo in japan

again we broke the england japan speed

record

on my return to britain i met jim

mollison

jim who came from scotland was also

a record-breaking aviator a few hours

after our first meeting he asked me to

marry him

we were flying together at the time the

british newspapers called us the flying

sweethearts

and on the 29th of july 1932

we were married

soon afterwards i flew solo to cape town

in south africa

in the puss moth the journey took four

days and seven hours

a new record this time

the record which i broke had been

established by my

own husband

in february 1933

i was happy to receive an honor i was

given the seagrave

trophy for aviation and soon after that

jim and i flew together again

we made a non-stop flight from wales

in the west of britain to the usa

the aeroplane this time was a de

havilland dragon rapide

we reached the usa but we ran out of

fuel before we could land at an airfield

we crashed into the ground at bridgeport

connecticut

we were both hurt but not very badly

the flight made us famous in america

people in new york and in atlantic city

gave us a wonderful welcome

when we got back to england i started on

a new career

i began to sell aeroplanes for a company

which built them

but soon there were other flights to

make and other records to break

i still spent much of my time in the air

in 1934 jim and i flew to india

we were in a race to reach australia

an engine problem stopped us in

allahabad

we couldn’t continue to australia but we

had established a new record for a

britain to

india flight after my flight

in 1932 another pilot had broken my

britain to south africa record

but in 1936 i won it again

[Music]

this was my last record-breaking flight

in the years before the second world war

i was a famous person a celebrity

a composer horatio nichols wrote a

popular song about me called

amy wonderful amy

and several well-known singers recorded

it

my photograph was often in the

newspapers

it was a towering life but a happy one

most of the time

one thing made me sad after six years of

marriage

jim and i decided we didn’t want to be

together anymore

i stopped using the name amy mollison

and i became amy johnson

again

when the war started in 1939

i joined the air transport auxiliary

this was a group of pilots which

included many women

we worked with the british royal air

force

many new aeroplanes were built each week

our job was to fly them from the

factories to the military airfields

where they were needed

although women weren’t allowed to fly

into battle this was important war work

too on the 5th of january

1941 i was asked to fly an airplane

from blackpool to oxford it was quite a

short distance

for someone with my history but that

flight

was my last the weather over england

that day was really bad

and i became lost i flew

much too far east i ran out of fuel

and my airplane crashed into the wide

mouth of the river thames

i died in the very cold

water