Amy Johnson's Gipsy Moth Jason
De Havilland Aircraft Company, Stag Lane · 1928
A small green biplane with the name Jason painted on its nose hangs in the Flight gallery. It is a de Havilland Gipsy Moth, the light aircraft that made private flying possible in the 1920s, and in it a twenty six year old secretary from Hull called Amy Johnson flew alone from Croydon to Darwin in May 1930. She was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia. The journey took nineteen days and covered about eighteen thousand kilometres, across Europe, the Middle East, India, Burma and the islands of the East Indies, in an open cockpit with a map on her knee.
Johnson had less than a hundred hours of flying experience when she set off and had never flown further than Hull. She was, however, a qualified ground engineer, the first woman in Britain to hold the licence, and she serviced the aircraft herself at every stop. Look at the size of the machine: one hundred horsepower, a cruising speed of about a hundred and thirty kilometres an hour, and a fuel tank in the top wing. The aircraft was second hand, bought with money from her father and from the oil magnate Lord Wakefield, whose company name appears on the fuselage.
She was mobbed in Australia and became a celebrity overnight, one of the great heroines of the age. The Moth was presented to the museum in 1931. Johnson went on to set other records, married the aviator Jim Mollison, and died in 1941 while ferrying aircraft for the Air Transport Auxiliary, when she baled out over the Thames estuary in bad weather. A memorable detail is the name: Jason was the trademark of her father's fish business, not the Greek hero.
Did You Know? Jason was named not after the Greek hero but after the trademark of her father's fish merchant business in Hull.
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