Amelia Earhart
Courtesy FAA
Amelia Mary Earhart was born on July 24, 1897, in
Atchison, Kansas, in a house her grandfather, Judge Alfred
G. Otis, built in 1861. Because her father, an attorney who
worked as a claim’s adjuster for a railroad, travelled a lot
for his job, Amelia and her sister, Muriel, spent a lot of
time with their grandparents. After her grandparents died,
the family moved often. Amelia completed high school in
Chicago in 1916. In 1918 she left junior college to become
a nurse’s aide in a military hospital in Toronto, the city
where her sister lived.
After the war and after a short stint at Columbia University in a pre-med program,
Amelia dropped out of school and moved to California where her parents then lived. She took
her first plane ride in 1920 and became hooked. She later recalled, “As soon as we left the
ground, I knew I had to fly.” She began flying lessons with female aviator Anita “Neta” Snook,
working odd jobs to pay for her lessons. She received a pilot’s license in December 1921 from
the National Aeronautics Association (the federal government did not begin issuing pilot’s
licenses until 1927). She set a women’s altitude record of 14,000 feet in October 1922. On May
16, 1923, she received an international pilot’s license from the Federation Aeronautique
Internationale (FAI), becoming the 16
th
woman to earn that honor.
When her parents divorced in 1924, Amelia moved with her mother and sister to
Massachusetts where she worked as a social worker at the Dennison settlement house in Boston.
But, her first love was still flying. In June 1928, she become the first woman to cross the Atlantic
in an airplane – as a passenger. Receiving accolades for the trip, Earhart responded that the pilot
did all the work, she just sat in back like “a sack of potatoes.” Working with publicist George
Putman, she wrote a book about the flight. With Putnam as her manager, she embarked on a
national book tour, began to endorse a number of products, and became the aviation editor for
Cosmopolitan magazine. She used the proceeds from this work to purchase a single engine
Lockheed Vega in 1929. That year, she participated in the Women’s Air Derby race from Santa
Monic, California, to Cleveland, Ohio, and placed third. In 1930, she received a U.S. air
transport pilot license and set the women’s world flying speed record of 181.18 miles per hour.
In 1931 she became the first president of the Ninety-Nines, Inc., an organization she helped to
establish for women pilots. Amelia married George Putnam in February 1931.
Amelia also became the first woman to fly an autogyro, an early helicopter. On April 8,
1931, she took a test flight in a Pitcairn PCA2 autogyro, flying it to an altitude of 18,415 feet.
She subsequently demonstrated the craft at a number of airshows. At a show in Detroit,
Michigan, in September 1931, she crashed her autogyro attempting to land. She did not get hurt
in the accident, but after several previous hard landings, she never flew an autogyro again.
Amelia Earhart and Eugene Vidal in CAA plane
Courtesy FAA
The following year, she became the first
woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, flying
from Newfoundland to Northern Ireland. For this
feat, she earned the Distinguished Flying Cross from
Congress, the Cross of Knight of the Legion of
Honor from the French government, and the Gold
Medal of the National Geographic Society. She
followed up her trans-Atlantic crossing with a solo
flight across the United States, a solo flight from
Honolulu, Hawaii to Oakland, California, and a solo
flight from Mexico City to New York. Her feats
earned her three consecutive Harmon trophies as
America’s Outstanding Airwoman. In 1936 she
began planning for a flight around the world.
Working closely with her husband, navigator Fred Noonan, and Eugene Vidal the head of
the federal Bureau of Air Commerce (a FAA predecessor agency), she planned her historic
flight. After their first attempt ended in failure, she and Noonan departed from Miami, Florida,
on June 1, 1937, and flew east to west with stops in South America, Africa, India, and Lae, New
Guinea. They departed Lae for Howland Island on July 2, 1937. They disappeared en route, and
although a search was conducted until October 1937, Earhart and Noonan were never found. A
court in Los Angeles declared the aviatrix legally dead on January 5, 1939.
