A former US air force pilot recently claimed to have located legendary pilot Amelia Earhart’s plane, which went missing during the female aviator’s attempt to set the record as the first woman to fly around the world. The legendary pilot set many other records, too.
In 2009, Hilary Swank starred in a biographical film called Amelia, which took audiences on the journey of the trailblazing pilot’s life from childhood through to her last record attempt. But how did Amelia Earhart rise to prominence and fame during her life?
Born in Kansas in 1897, it was at the age of 23 that Amelia Earhart experienced her first flight. With her father, Edwin, she attended an ‘aerial meet’ at Daughtery Field in Long Beach, California, and, while there, she got her father to ask about passenger flights and flying lessons.
She was booked in for a passenger flight the following day at Emory Roger’s Field in Los Angeles, where she was taken up into the air for ten minutes by pilot Frank Hawks. This was an experience she later wrote about in her book Last Flight, saying “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly.”
Amelia Earhart continued to gain flying experience throughout her twenties, when in 1928, after Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic, she received a phone call from Captain Hilton H. Bailey, who asked her if she would like to fly across the Atlantic.
Records Set by Pilot Emilia Earhart
She accompanied pilot Wilmer Stultz and co-pilot Louis Gordon on the flight as a passenger but with the duty of maintaining the flight log. The crew left from Trepassey Harbor, Newfoundland in a plane named “Friendship” on June 17, 1928, landing in South Wales exactly twenty hours and forty minutes later.
When interviewed after landing, she told the press “Stultz did all the flying—he had to. I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes. Maybe someday I’ll try it alone.”
The record she had set for being the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a plane, as a passenger, gave Amelia Earhart a minor celebrity status, but she wanted to set an “untarnished” record of her own.
Shortly after her return from the transatlantic group flight, she set off on her first long solo flight, which, on completion, made her the first woman to fly solo across the North American continent and back. Continuing to push boundaries, in 1932, piloting a Lockheed Vega 5B, she made a nonstop solo transatlantic flight, becoming the first woman to achieve such a feat.
She received the United States Distinguished Flying Cross for this accomplishment.
Celebrity sponsorship allowed the pilot to finance her flying career. Accepting a position as associate editor at Cosmopolitan magazine, she utilized her new platform to campaign for greater public acceptance of women entering the field of aviation.
In 1929, she became one of the first aviators to promote commercial air travel through the development of a passenger airline service. She also represented Transcontinental Air Transport and invested time and money in setting up the first regional shuttle service between New York and Washington D.C., the Ludington Airline.
Moreover, Earhart was vice president of National Airways, which was responsible for the flying operations of the Boston-Maine Airways and a handful of other airlines in the northeast. Later in life, she became a visiting faculty member at Purdue University as an advisor to aeronautical engineering and a career counselor to female students.
She was also an active member of the National Woman’s Party and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The Disappearance of Amelia Earhart
On June 1, 1937, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Oakland, California on an eastbound transcontinental flight in a twin-engine Lockheed Electra. Less than a month later, they arrived in Lae, New Guinea, having flown 22,000 miles. They still had 7,000 miles to go before returning to Oakland.
After leaving Lae, they had to fly 2,500 miles to their next refueling stop, Howland Island, a small island in the Pacific. Earhart and Noonan were unable to reach their destination due to overcast skies, radio transmission issues, and a lack of fuel.
Despite extensive efforts to locate the plane, which ended up being the most expensive air and sea search in American history up to that point, there was no sign of Earhart or Noonan anywhere. More than eighteen months later, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were declared dead.
What happened after the crash is still unclear. In its report, the US government concluded that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed into the vast ocean.
Given the mystery surrounding this event, several theories have emerged, one of which is that Earhart was a secret agent for the US government and was kidnapped by the Japanese. Such theories, however, are still being debated today.
Investigations and significant public interest in their disappearance continue to this day.
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