Jessie Miller

Jessie Maude "Chubbie" Miller was an Australian aviator born in Western Australia in 1901 who died in London in 1972. In 1927 she financed and flew with the Royal Air Force officer Bill Lancaster in an Avro Avian named Red Rose, attempting a long distance record from England to Australia. Bad weather forced them down in Sumatra, but they continued and, after 159 days, she arrived as the first woman to complete an England-to-Australia flight, a feat later followed by Amy Johnson's solo flight in 1930. Moving to the United States, she competed in the 1929 Powder Puff Derby, set a women's east-west cross-country record in 1930, and force-landed in the Bahamas after being feared lost on a flight from Havana to Miami. She was a founding member of the Ninety-Nines, the organisation for women pilots, and the first woman to earn a commercial pilot's licence in Canada. Her later life was overshadowed by the trial of Lancaster for the 1932 shooting of the writer Haden Clarke, of which he was acquitted.