Amelia Earhart

A pioneering aviator and inspirational figure, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to
fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and set many other records throughout her career. Her
disappearance in 1937 during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe devastated
admirers across the United States and around the world. Her public career lasted less
than a decade (from 1928 to 1937), but she used her fame to promote two causes dear to
her: the advancement of commercial aviation and the advancement of women.
Earhart symbolized the fascination that aviation held for Americans in the 1920s and
1930s. Like Charles Lindbergh, she became a national celebrity because of her exploits
in the air. Her modest demeanor and short, tousled hair made her a perfect heroine for a
media-conscious age.
Earharts entire life had a certain restless quality. By 1928, she had found a calling of
sorts as a social worker in Boston who flew in her spare time. When New York
publisher George Palmer Putnam asked if she wanted to be the first woman to fly the
Atlantic, she readily agreed. The June 1928 flight from Newfoundland to Burry Port,
Wales, made her an instant celebrity, although she was quick to note that she had been
merely a passenger, a sack of potatoes, who kept the log. When she soloed the Atlantic
in 1932, another first for women, she proved to the world and, more important, to
herself that 1928 had not been a fluke.
After the 1928 flight, Earhart turned her hobby of flying into a paying career. As a
lecturer, author, and airline industry vice president, she preached her message that flying
would soon be an accepted part of everyday life. Her career was managed by Putnam,
whom she married in 1931 in what was as much a business relationship as a love match.
Earhart kept her own name professionally and made no plans to have children. She
continued to identify herself publicly with feminism and served as the first president of
the Ninety-Nines, an organization of women pilots.
Amelia Earhart had a poets appreciation of flight, and she flew because she wanted to,
which to her individualistic mind-set was the best reason of all. She was delighted when
Purdue University, where she had served as aviation consultant and counselor on careers
for women since 1935, presented her with a Lockheed Electra so advanced she dubbed
it the flying laboratory. Now she could fulfill her ambition to fly around the world. The
first attempt in March 1937 ended prematurely when her plane crashed on takeoff in
Hawaii. A second attempt began two months later, now following a west-to-east
direction. On July 2, 1937, during the hardest leg, a 2,556-mile segment from New
Guinea to a tiny speck in the mid-Pacific called Howland Island, Earhart and her
navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared.
The circumstances of Earharts popping off (her matter-of-fact phrase) have been a
source of speculation ever since. Was she on a spy mission for Franklin Roosevelt? Did

she land on a desert island and become a Japanese prisoner? The weight of evidence
suggests that her plane ran out of fuel somewhere near Howland Island and sank
quickly. But given the aviators hold on the popular imagination, the search for Amelia
Earhart continues.
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