TOOK HER BA DEGREE

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 981, 26 May 1930, Page 11

TOOK HER BA DEGREE

SECOND-HAND PLANE USED ON TRIP ROMANTIC SIDE OF FLIGHT British Official Wireless Reed. 12.10 p.m. RUGBY, Saturday. Miss Amy Johnson has completed I in 20 days a wonderful solo flight of j approximely 10,400 miles over a route which presented almost every variety : of difficulty which an aviator can encounter. She is 22 years of age and took her | first flying lesson IS months ago. After leaving Sheffield University, where she obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree, she took up secretarial work in the office of a London solici- | tor. - A visit to the Stag Lane Airdrome aroused in her ambitions to fly, and j she arranged to have lessons. She showed from the first a remark- 1 able aptitude. Not content with ob- j taining a pilot’s licence, she studied j engineering and was the first air- j woman to become a qualified ground ; engineer. Her longest flight before the one i just completed was from London to j her native town of Hull, a distance of 147 miles, and her actual flying life was only 90 hours. DISCOURAGED BY EXPERTS Consequently, when she conceived the idea of flying to Australia, the experts she approached for advice and assistance mostly provided discouragement and warnings. She was so persistent, however, that her father enabled her to buy a secondhand machine some years old, in which Captain Hope, the well-known airman, had already flown 35,000 miles in Africa and elsewhere. But it was a good machine, one of the famous de Haviland Moth light planes with 100 li.p. Gipsy engine. Finally the oil and petrol companies, probably more out of good-nature than in any expectation she would get far, promised her help along the route. Thus on May 5, with a spare propeller strapped on her little machine, and with the passenger’s seat filled with extra petrol storage, she waved her hand to her father and set off alone for Australia. It was only when she arrived at India on the sixth day, two days under ! the time made by Hinkler on his 15A days’ record flight to Australia, that the newspapers awoke to the fact that this girl, unknown to the public a week before, was an airwoman of quite exceptional mettle. HARDSHIPS EN ROUTE She had then made a difficult flight across Anatolia and the 8,000-feet high Taurus Mountains amid storms and dense clouds, and had effected a blinding sandstorm, had gone on again and had' kept going in conditions of intense difficulty. On the later stages she benefited by the hospitality and assistance of the Dutch authorities, who were as, anxious as her own countrymen that her superb adventure should end with the success it has achieved. Appropriately enough, it was ended on Empire Day. Miss Johnson has received hundreds of telegrams from all parts of the world, including tributes by all the leading airmen and airwomen, including Sir Vernon Roe, Captain de Haviland, the Duchess of Bedford and Miss Spooner.