A Late Start in the Air
Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas, in 1897, into a family destabilized by her father's drinking and frequent moves. During the First World War she worked as a nurse's aide in a military hospital in Toronto, where wounded airmen first drew her toward flying. A ten-minute joyride in California in 1920 settled it. She took lessons from Neta Snook, one of the few professional women instructors in the country, bought a small yellow biplane with family help, and set an unofficial women's altitude record within two years.
Money ran out, as it did for most pilots of that generation, and she worked as a social worker in Boston while flying when she could. In 1928 she was invited to join a transatlantic flight as a passenger, chosen partly because she was photogenic, articulate, and resembled Charles Lindbergh. The crossing made her famous overnight, and she was clear-eyed about it, describing herself afterward as little more than baggage on a flight that two men had actually flown.
Records and Publicity
The promoter behind that flight, the publisher George Putnam, became her manager and, in 1931, her husband, after she wrote him a letter on their wedding day setting out her conditions, including her refusal to be bound by any medieval code of faithfulness and her insistence on her own work. He was a brilliant marketer who kept her in newsprint, on lecture platforms, and attached to a clothing line and luggage brand. The arrangement funded the flying and also blurred the line between achievement and publicity in ways rivals resented.
The achievements were real. In May 1932 she flew a Lockheed Vega alone from Newfoundland to a field in Northern Ireland, through ice, a broken altimeter, and a leaking fuel line, becoming the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo. She followed it with the first solo flight from Hawaii to California in 1935, a route that had already killed several fliers. She helped found the Ninety-Nines, the association of women pilots, and served as its first president, arguing for women's place in commercial aviation.
The Last Flight
In 1936 Purdue University helped fund a twin-engine Lockheed Electra she called a flying laboratory, and she planned a circumnavigation near the equator. The first attempt ended in a violent ground loop at Luke Field in Hawaii in March 1937. On the second attempt, flying eastward with the navigator Fred Noonan, she covered most of the world in about a month. The last, longest leg was a two-thousand-five-hundred-mile crossing from Lae in New Guinea to Howland Island, a flat speck barely visible from the air.
On July 2, 1937, the Coast Guard cutter Itasca received her voice transmissions near Howland but could not establish two-way contact; frequency and equipment mismatches, and gaps in radio and celestial navigation preparation, all played a part. She reported running low on fuel and was never heard again. The search was the largest and costliest in American naval history to that point. The likeliest conclusion remains that the Electra ran out of fuel and sank, though later expeditions and theories about nearby atolls continue to generate claims without proof.
