The Last Flight Of Record-Breaking WWII Pilot Amy Johnson

On a cold, stormy January night in 1941, an Allied plane plunged into the Thames Estuary near Kent, England. Sailors aboard HMS Haslemere, escorting a convoy toward the port of Southend, watched the crash and the slower descent of the pilot’s parachute. Through the falling snow, they could see the downed pilot in the dark water, struggling to swim through heaving waves and a rushing tide. Some of the men aboard HMS Haslemere and the convoy ships may even have recognized her: Amy Johnson, an English pilot famed for breaking speed and distance records in the adventurous prewar years.

Johnson became the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia in 1930 – a 19 day, 18,000 kilometer (11,000 mile) flight that landed the young pilot from Yorkshire in an international spotlight. The next year, she and her copilot Jack Humphreys made the 2,830 km (1,760 mile) flight from London to Moscow in a single grueling day, become the first pilots to pull off that feat. From Moscow, Johnson and Humphreys took off again and flew across Siberia to Tokyo to claim a second record: the fastest flight from England to Japan. Later, Johnson set records for flights from the UK to South Africa and to India.

When wartime Britain called on civilian pilots to help ferry military aircraft between factories, maintenance facilities, and Royal Air Force bases, Johnson signed up along with 165 other women.

The Air Transport Auxiliary accepted pilots who couldn’t serve in the RAF because they were too old, nearsighted, disabled, or women. Pilots with only one arm or leg – and in some cases, only one eye – helped the war effort by getting warplanes from factories to fighting units. For female pilots like Johnson, it was their chance to serve and to fly aircraft they might never have gotten their hands on otherwise.

“The war has placed opportunity right in her path,” wrote Johnson in an article about her ATA experience, which she sent to the journal of the Women’s Engineering Society just days before her January 5 crash. “At no expense to herself, she has been given the best training that money can buy – an RAF Central Flying School Conversion Course. From the light training machines, like Moth and Avian, she flew before the war at her local Flying Club, she has been ‘converted’ to fast modern types with their hundreds of knobs and complications.”

Some of the women for flew for the ATA came from overseas to do it. American pilot Jacqueline Cochran, who later became the first woman to break the sound barrier, served in the ATA. After the US entered the war, Cochran returned home to help found an American version of the service, called the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

And Margot Duhalde came from Chile, hoping to join the French Free Forces as a pilot. When she was told that the French Free Forces didn’t accept women as pilots, even for noncombat jobs like ferrying aircraft from factories, she joined the ATA instead – even after spending 5 days in a Liverpool jail because English authorities thought at first that she might be a spy. Despite that inauspicious welcome to Britain, Duhalde transported 900 aircraft during the war, mostly to bases near the front lines in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.  After the war, the French Air Force had a different view of female pilots; Duhalde became the country’s first combat pilot before returning home to Chile, where she became a flight instructor and Chile’s first female air traffic controller.

In her final article, Johnson reflected wistfully on the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire fighters she hadn’t yet been qualified to fly. ATA pilots moved those cutting-edge fighters along with heavy bombers like the Lancaster, Halifax, and B-17; torpedo bombers like the Fairey Swordfish and Barracuda; and an array of transports, trainers, and other aircraft. Some had to go from factories to maintenance facilities to have their guns and navigation equipment installed; others had to get to RAF bases in Britain or overseas. The ATA’s pilots delivered 309,000 aircraft during the war, putting in at least 415,000 flight hours.

And 174 pilots died in the efforts. 15 of those pilots were women, like Joy Davison, whose 2-seat Miles Master trainer made a fatal corkscrew dive into the ground on a training flight, killing Davison and her instructor. Investigators never determined what brought down Davison’s plane, but some reporters at the time speculated that a carbon monoxide leak in the cockpit had knocked out both pilots.

British authorities never determined what brought down Johnson’s aircraft that snowy night, either. It should have been a routine flight; she was taking a two-engine trainer called an Airspeed Oxford to an RAF base near, fittingly, Oxford. The Airspeed Oxford helped train bomber crews, gunners, navigators, and radio operators on their jobs.

The bad weather and poor visibility may have put Johnson a bit off course. Some suggested the she ran out of fuel. But in 1999, an antiaircraft gunner who had been watching the skies over the Thames that night claimed that he had shot Johnson down. According to the story the former gunner told reporters, he radioed Johnson’s plane and asked for an identification code, which would help distinguish a friendly pilot from an enemy. When Johnson gave the wrong code twice in a row, he shot her down.

58 years later, the gunner said he believed he’d shot down a German plane – until he read the news reports the next morning. His superiors told everyone involved to keep the friendly fire incident quiet, maybe for the sake of their own careers or maybe for the sake of wartime morale. And for decades, he did.

Aboard HMS Haslemere, sailors threw rescue ropes to the pilot in the water, but in the heavy seas, she couldn’t get close enough to grab hold. Then she vanished into the dark water beneath the ship’s hull, and that was the last anyone saw of her. Johnson’s body was never recovered.

Lieutenant Commander Walter Fletcher, the vessel’s captain, dived into the frigid waters himself; by the time a lifeboat picked him up, he was unconscious from hypothermia. Fletcher died in the hospital, a few days later, on January 8.

Today, a bronze statue of Johnson looks over Herne Bay and the Thames Estuary near the site where her plane went down. An engineering department building at the University of Sheffield bears her name (in 1934, Johnson was elected president of the Women’s Engineering Society; she was the youngest woman ever to hold the title). And every July, around the date when Johnson first received her pilot’s license, the Royal Aeronautical Society hosts the Amy Johnson Named Lecture in honor of the history of women in aviation.