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