NT remembers first female solo flight

Amy Johnson may have been fashionably late landing at Darwin 80 years ago, but the
pioneering aviatrix was on no ego trip.
She certainly had not intended keeping hundreds of people waiting in anxious
anticipation.
Like Australia's own Jessica Watson, she was simply doing what she loved.
On May 24, 1930, Ms Johnson, who preferred to be called "Johnny", became the first
woman to fly solo from London to Australia.
The daughter of a Yorkshire fish merchant, the 26-years-old had just 90 hours
flying experience when she took off from London's Croydon aerodrome on 5 May.
Northern Territory historian Peter Forrest said at the time men, and even most
women, scoffed at her ambition.
He said newspapers reported there was a good deal of concern when Ms Johnson was at
least an hour overdue.
"Several hundred people, the biggest crowd seen in Darwin for more than a decade,
had gathered near the Fannie Bay gaol," he told AAP.
Finally "a sunburnt girl, wearing an oil stained shirt, jodphurs and puttees, and a
green helmet, stepped onto Australian soil.
"Immediately, an admiring mass of people, all trying to shake her hand and hoist
her shoulder high, surged around her tiny, single-engined de Havilland Gipsy Moth
aircraft."
Mr Forrest said Darwin, with a population of about 2,000 at the time, had witnessed
eight flights from England since the Smith brothers arrived in 1919.
The London Daily Mail, which had exclusive rights to the "darling of the skies"
story wrote: "As Miss Johnson proceeded from the landing ground to town in a motor
car, a distance of five miles, flags were waved from the windows and doors of every
house along the road, which were occupied by every nationality under the sun."
Her quest was to fly solo to Australia in less than the 15-and-a-half days it had
taken Bert Hinkler to fly solo to Australia two years before.
Ms Johnson didn't break Bert Hinkler's record, but for the first few legs of her
flight she was well ahead of his time, Mr Forrest said.
"Then she lagged behind the record, but her elapsed time on arrival in Darwin made
hers the third fastest ever flight from England."
Mr Forrest said Ms Johnson told a crowd at the Darwin town hall that Australia was
the ideal land for aeroplane flying.
In her workman-like rig, Ms Johnson insisted: "I am not a bit of the masculine type,
I just love pretty things and nice clothes".
On the morning of 26 May she took off from Darwin with the intention of flying
through western Queensland to Brisbane.
But landing in Brisbane, Amy "crashed rather badly", and she did no further flying
in Australia.
"Sadly, the girl who had simply wanted to become a pilot found herself a heroine
wherever she went," Mr Forrest said.
On January 5, 1941 the aircraft she was flying on a delivery flight crashed into the
River Thames. She bailed out but drowned.
Roads and landmarks in NT have since been named in her honour