2
Jon: It would be great to find out if there's some way to prove that this is actually a piece of
Amelia Earhart's aircraft.
Elyse: I’ll see what I can find out.
Jon: Thanks so much. Be careful with it
Elyse: The first thing I notice is that it’s very light. You can see the jagged edge that is was
definitely torn from something. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be straight or bent. There
appears to be some type of maybe a rivet hole here. Maybe one was here and it was missing but,
I’m not really sure. According to Jon’s grandfather’s account, the crash occurred at Luke Field
Hawaii, when Amelia was attempting the second leg of her around the world flight, on March 20
th
- 1937. Jon's grandfather, Dan W. Stringer was a member of the military service with assignment
in the 50
th
Observation Squadron, Luke Field, Hawaii, 1936-1938. There’s a photo with the letter
– which Jon told me his grandfather had taken the day of the accident. I need to find out more
about the day this photo may have been taken.
Let’s see what historians have reported. Here’s something: in 1937 Amelia Earhart began her
around the world flight in a Lockheed Electra l-1oe. This certainly looks like the aircraft pictured in
the affidavit. Amelia chose the l-10e because it had the largest engines of the l-10 line. Only 15
were ever made, and only two private individuals owned one: Earhart and aviation mogul Howard
Hughes. The l-10e could carry 250 gallons of fuel. But Earhart replaced the passenger seats with
fuel tanks – enough to carry 1200 gallons, ten times the original capacity – so she could fly longer
distances. And she called her plane "the flying laboratory" for its experimental nature. Amelia
Earhart rode in her first airplane at age 23, and later wrote, “As soon as I left the ground, I knew I
myself had to fly.” Earhart was committed to demonstrating to the male-dominated aviation world
that a woman pilot could be as good, or better, than a man. A year after she got her pilot’s
license, she’d set her first altitude record. In 1928 Earhart’s fame spread when she became the
first woman to fly across the Atlantic - as a passenger. Nine years later, she was the first woman
pilot to fly non-stop across the United States, the first to fly from Mexico City to Newark, New
Jersey, and captured several speed and altitude records. After Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart
was the second person to cross the Atlantic solo. An impressive feat by itself, but because she
was a woman, she became world famous.