Amy Johnson

Amy Johnson was your classic dreamer. Anybody who’s ever pushed back from the expected will recognize a little bit of themselves in her story. Well, except for the parts where Johnson became a world-renowned and record-setting pilot.

Born in Kingston upon Hull, England, in 1903, the daughter of a fish merchant whose family firm had been at it for generations, Johnson was a bright student who won a rare place at Sheffield University and earned a BA in economics in 1925, an unusual achievement for a woman of her class and era. She returned to Hull for a secretarial course, took her first airplane ride in 1926 on a five-shilling pleasure flight, and by 1927 had moved to London to find work. She landed at a law firm on Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a typist, then secretary, to solicitor William Charles Crocker. It was a respectable, desk-bound life, and it bored her nearly to tears.

Then, the call of something more, something thrilling and maybe even dangerous