Amy Johnson strove to become the UK’s answer to Amelia Earhart. After a couple of solo flights, she determined to be the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia. No private aircraft had ever managed that feat before. She has considerably less interest in her feat than Amelia, however, and it took an intense letter-writing campaign on her behalf to get the plane and arrange the logistics. With all that squared away, and with just some short-haul flight experience under he belt, Johnson readied her red-and-silver airplane for the journey into the record books.

On this day, May 5, Johnson took off in a De Havilland Moth airplane, modified with larger engine and extra fuel tanks that gave it a 13-hour flight time, towards the Australian cast. With many fitful starts and stops, she managed to reach Australia on the 24th of May, and achieved instant celebrityhood.

Johnson’s celebrity status increased as she continued to make record flights along with her husband. On one of those trips, in 1933, she was forced to crash-land on an airfield in Pennsylvania, according to the reports of the day, “after Husband ignored Wife’s advice to stop and refuel”. The pictures showed the two on a pair of deck chairs, with Husband, who looked decidely the worse off from the landing, stating dryly “we didn’t arrive in quite the way we anticipated”