Evelyn Johnson, Pilot Who Set Records, Dies at 102 Evelyn Bryan Johnson last flew a plane in 2005. Two years later, she remained eager to get back behind the controls. "It's not the flying that's the problem," she said in an interview with USA Today. It's getting the prosthesis into the small planes. I'm working on it. But the loss of a leg and glaucoma conspired to end the flying career of the woman who at her death at 102, on Thursday in Jefferson City, Tenn., had piloted an airplane more hours than anybody else alive - 57,635.4 hours, or more than 6 1/2 years. No woman has flown more and only one man has. Neither have aeronautical giants like Chuck Yeager and John Glenn. Don Beach, a pastor and flight instructor who will preach her funeral sermon, confirmed the death. In 2002, Mrs. Johnson, then 92, was the oldest flight instructor in the world, according to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. She continued teaching for three more years. Born just six years after the Wright brothers" first flight in 1903, she flew 5.5 million miles, equal to 23 trips to the moon. (Her hours, as regulations require, include periods when students were at the controls, but she, as instructor, was in charge. This last happened in 2005.) The record for hours flown is held by Ed Long, an Alabamian, who had racked up more than 64,000 hours - most of that under 200 feet as he surveyed power lines in a Piper Cub. Legend has it that one of Mr. Long's last statements was "Don't let that woman beat me." Had she been able to fly after she developed glaucoma and her leg was amputated after an auto accident in 2006, Mrs. Johnson might have done just that. As it was, she continued to manage a local airport beyond the age of 100. She taught 5,000 student pilots before she stopped counting, and certified more than 9,000 for the Federal Aviation Administration. Nicknamed Mama Bird, she taught future pilots of jetliners and cargo planes, future airline executives and former Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee. When it came time in Senator Baker's flight test for him to deliberately stall the plane, he told Mrs. Johnson, "This airplane wasn't made for stalls." "I told him that if we don't do them he'd just have to get along without his private pilot's license," she recalled. He did them. Evelyn Stone, the daughter of a schoolteacher and a conductor on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, was born in Corbin, Ky., on Nov. 4, 1908. Her family moved to Tennessee when she was 6, and she graduated from Tennessee Wesleyan College. She taught sixth grade for two years. She met W. J. Bryan while attending summer school at the University of Tennessee. They married in 1931 and two years later borrowed $250 from his father to open a dry-cleaning business. Mr. Bryan enlisted in the Army in 1941. She decided to take up flying as a hobby. To get to her first flight lesson, she had to take a train and a bus, walk a quarter-mile and then row to the airport, to which a bridge had not yet been built. She first soloed on Nov. 8, 1944. She received a private license in 1945 and a commercial certificate in 1946. She became a flight instructor in 1947. Over the years she sold Cessna airplanes, wrote about aviation for trade papers, participated in airplane races to Havana and across America, and became one of the first women to get a helicopter license. As a pilot of many kinds of aircraft, including a jet, she never crashed, maneuvering out of engine failures twice and a fire once. Among her many honors, she was named flight instructor of the year in 1979 by the Federal Aviation Administration and inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2007. Mr. Bryan died in 1963, and she married Morgan Johnson in 1965. He died in 1977. She is survived by two grandsons and three great-grandchildren. Mrs. Johnson said she would retire when she was old enough, which she never was. Each time she went up in a plane - her last flight was as a passenger in Mr. Beach's plane in 2009 - she said she saw something new and beautiful.