Nancy Bird Walton

"Other women who flew were women of independent means. But I had to do something with it."

"Things like radio etc. didn't exist. You passed an aeroplane on the right and the aircraft landing had priority over the one taking off. There was no control tower, and no control. If you were going to practice flying through cloud you told someone on the aerodrome that's what you were going to do and that was enough!"

"As a four-year-old, my mother told me I was climbing the fence, jumping off and calling myself an 'eppyplane' … I bought books on aeroplanes, I followed everything in the newspapers about aeroplanes. Amy Johnson flew to Australia in 1930 - why couldn't I do something like that?"