Amy Johnson: queen of the air Midge Gillies Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 384pp, £20 ISBN 0297829823

These days, Croydon Airport is a tatty collection of neon-lit fast-food outlets hemmed in by the noisy A23. But outside the former terminal building perches a vehicle from another era, a biplane barely larger than a modern 4x4 Land Cruiser. In the conning tower is an exhibition run by enthusiasts with a Tiger Moth suspended from the ceiling. Its frame is plywood and fabric; the fragility is breathtaking. In May 1930 an even smaller plane, a Gipsy Moth that she christened "Jason", was flown solo by Amy Johnson, a typist from Hull, from this airfield to Australia in just three weeks.

Of all the record-breaking flights of the age, her achievement is linked for ever with the miracles of early aviation. The Amy Johnson Appreciation Society is still flourishing 60 years after her death. Midge Gillies admits to being besotted: this new autobiography, timed for the centenary of her birth, succeeds superbly in conveying the courage and panache that made Amy such a popular and enduring icon.

In Australia, she was mobbed; on her return to Croydon after the historic flight, she was greeted by a quarter of a million people. She was an overnight sensation. The grimly determined young woman who had struggled to find sponsors (her father, a fish-merchant, sent crates of kippers to help), who battled period pains in the air, crash-landed in Rangoon, repeatedly repaired her engine overnight, filled the tanks herself and set off again with no sleep, was a truly heroic figure. As Gillies shows, parallels with Ellen MacArthur rebound in Amy's favour, for she had no radio and was crossing unmapped deserts and seas where rescue was unlikely. Admirers showered her with money and jewellery, but through it peers her bewildered, exhausted face, unused to such adulation and press attention and unsure how to handle it.

As a record it wasn't much - within months Charles Kingsford Smith did it in nine days. And she wasn't the only female flyer, or the first British woman to get her pilot's licence. Indeed, when Amy arrived in the US in 1933 she was astonished to discover more than 600 female pilots, many of whom flew in to fete her at a lunch. The truth is that the UK, despite its political pre-eminence, had already lost the battle for dominance of the skies. Not until 1940, goaded by Churchill, did a dozy nation wake up, almost too late.

In their heyday, Amy and the man she married in 1932, her fellow flyer Jim Mollison, were the Posh and Becks of their time: as "The Flying Sweethearts" they were lauded all over the world, with lunch at the White House and friendly chats with the King, Queen and Prince of Wales. It might have been better for Amy if this had not been so. Seduced by fame and money, she became a less sympathetic character, rowing with her devoted parents, choosing to have a hysterectomy at the age of 29, screaming distractedly at the boorish Jim, selling her soul to the Daily Mail. The marriage lasted barely a year before they separated. On Good Friday 1935, at the wheel of her new Mercedes car, Amy killed a motorcyclist. Frequently in court on charges of dangerous driving, much of the rest of her short life seems to have been a downhill spiral of misery and depression until her supposedly mysterious demise at the age of 37.

Apart from the personal tragedy, this is a history of fortitude in the face of jaw-dropping prejudice. While the early female pioneers seem to have found comradeship with their male colleagues, discrimination - through lower pay and exclusion from clubs - was rife. Some women, including Amy, contributed to the stereotyping: lady (or "girl") pilots were expected to emerge from their battered planes in high-heeled shoes with lipstick intact and hair in place. They were banned from the RAF and had to fight for the right to fly in wartime at all. "The menace," thundered the magazine the Aeroplane, "is the woman who wants to fly a high-speed bomber . . . and yet can't cook her husband's dinner."

Amy's plane came down in bad weather over the Thames estuary in January 1941. She was still alive in the water as she called to rescuers on HMS Haslemere, but then vanished: the body was never found. It seems likely that she was cut to pieces by the ship's propeller, a possibility kept from a grieving public. However, Tom Mit-chell, an anti-aircraft gunner, harboured the suspicion that he had shot her down - a secret he kept to himself for 60 years. Gillies shows that Amy had disappeared hours before he fired a shot.

Gillies is to be congratulated. This is an engrossing read and a first-rate story about a remarkable woman.

Edwina Currie's most recent book is Diaries 1987-92 (Time Warner)

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