May 30

Amelia Earhart[i] by virtue of her many long-distance airplane flights is well known. Well because of that and because she disappeared over the Pacific and was never seen again. On December 28, 1920,[ii] Amelia went on her first airplane ride as a passenger. Earhart’s days as a serious flier began in October 1922 when she set a record for altitude achieved[iii]. She followed this with the impressive string of firsts for which she is rightfully well known. However, she was not the only woman to engage in feats of such derring-do. Born on the 30th in 1907, Elly Beinhorn Rosemeyer was almost ten years younger that Amelia, but she managed to offer some stiff competition in the girl-flier game. In 1931, she began long-distance flights between her home in Germany and West Africa. In March 1932, Elly became the second woman to fly solo, non-stop, from Europe to Australia. No, the first woman to do that was not Earhart; it was England’s Amy Johnson[iv], when she landed in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia on May 24, 1930.
[i] Amelia was taught how to fly by Anita ‘Neta’ Snook Southern, the first female aviator in Iowa and the first female student accepted to the Curtiss Flying School in Virginia. She taught Amelia to fly using a surplus Curtiss JN-4, an open cockpit bi-plane.
[ii] She attended a fair in Long Beach, California and from the moment the airplane, piloted by Frank Monroe Hawks, lifted off the field, Amelia was convinced that she had to fly. On June 2, 1933, Hawks would set the west-east transcontinental airspeed record. He flew from Los Angeles, California to Brooklyn, New York in 13 hours, 26 minutes and 15 seconds.
[iii] Earhart reached an altitude of 14,000 feet.
[iv] Amy Johnson left Croydon, England on her flight to Australia on May 5, 1930 and landed in Darwin, Australia on May 24. I realize that I could have put her in the main body of this thing. I could probably have made the whole issue about her, but I found Rosemeyer first, so I consigned Amy to the notes section. So sue me. In the Second World War, Johnson served as a pilot in Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying warplanes and military personnel from the UK to pretty much anywhere in the world except to aircraft carriers.