Amelia Earhart

American aviator

• Born: July 24, 1897
• Birthplace: Atchison, Kansas
• Died: July 2?, 1937
• Place of death: Near Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean

By being the first woman to fly across the Atlantic and by establishing numerous other flying records, Earhart helped to promote commercial aviation and advance the cause of women in aviation.

Early Life

Amelia Earhart (eh-MEEL-yeh EHR-hahrt), the daughter of Amy Otis and Edwin Stanton Earhart, was born in the home of her maternal grandparents in Atchison, Kansas. Her grandfather was Alfred G. Otis, a pioneer Atchison settler who became a prominent lawyer, banker, and federal district court judge. Her father worked for a railroad as an attorney and claims agent.

Earhart’s early childhood was spent in Kansas City, Kansas, where she and her younger sister learned to ride horseback. When her father accepted a job in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1905, Earhart and her sister remained for a year in Atchison, where she later recalled, “There were regular games and school and mud-ball fights, picnics, and exploring raids up and down the bluffs of the Missouri River.” After joining her father in Des Moines, Earhart attended school and began reading the books that further encouraged her spirit of adventure. Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Makepeace Thackeray were her favorite authors, and she and her sister made up imaginary journeys while they played in an abandoned carriage.

When her father went to work for the Great Northern railroad, the Earharts moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, but Edwin’s alcoholism grew worse, and her mother took her daughters to Chicago, where Earhart was graduated from Hyde Park High School in June, 1916. She attended the Ogontz School in Rydal, Pennsylvania, then went to Toronto, Canada, where her sister was in school. In Toronto, she saw wounded veterans of World War I and became a Red Cross volunteer. She worked at Spadina Military Hospital, where she came to know and admire the young fliers of the Royal Flying Corps. In 1918, she was ill with pneumonia and went to live with her sister in Northampton, Massachusetts. While her sister was enrolled at Smith College, Earhart took a course in automobile repair. In 1919, she moved to were chosen to study medicine at Columbia University but left after a year to join her parents in Los Angeles.

The aviation industry was just beginning to develop in Southern California, and Earhart was attracted to the air shows and flying demonstrations at local airports. She took her first airplane ride from the Glendale airport and soon convinced her parents to help her take flying lessons with a pioneer woman pilot, Neta Snook. In June, 1921, Earhart made her first solo flight in a Kinner Airster. One year later, she had saved two thousand dollars to buy a three-cylinder Kinner Canary, a plane in which she set a woman’s altitude record of fourteen thousand feet. Her career as a pilot was launched.

Life’s Work

Even in 1922, however, flying was expensive, and paid employment for women in aviation was limited. When her parents were divorced, Earhart sold her plane and returned to Massachusetts, where she taught English to immigrants and became a social worker at Denison House, a Boston settlement. She was able to combine her interests in social work and aviation, on one occasion flying over Boston and dropping leaflets announcing a Denison House street fair and on another judging a model airplane contest for the National Playground Association.

In 1928, she was selected by the publisher George P. Putnam to fly with pilot Wilmer Stutz and mechanic Lou Gordon in a Fokker trimotor across the Atlantic. The plane, named Friendship, had been purchased from the explorer Richard Byrd by Amy Phipps Guest, an American flying enthusiast who had married and settled in England. When Guest was unable to make the flight herself, she asked Putnam to find a young woman (he found Earhart) to represent her in the promotion of women in aviation. On June 3, Friendship left Boston for Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Trepassy, Newfoundland. Delayed by bad weather for several days, the plane left Trepassy on June 17 and landed the following day at Burry Port, Wales. Earhart was given a hero’s welcome on her return to New York.

Because her flight came only a little more than a year after the solo flight by Charles A. Lindbergh, and because of her tall, slender build and short, blond hair, she was nicknamed Lady Lindy, but she preferred to be called “AE.” Within a few months Putnam rushed her account of the flight, Twenty Hours Forty Minutes (1928), into print. The book is part autobiography, part journal of the flight, and part advocacy of flying in general. It is the third part that is most interesting because of her observations on the future of flying and on the role of women in aviation.

After stating that the remarkable thing about flying is that it is not remarkable, Earhart goes on to discuss the need for more attractive airports, a review of safety regulations, and better weather reporting. Women will have a role to play in all these areas, she asserts, because they have already had a major impact on the automobile industry. The airplane will be used for leisure and recreation, and the growing purchasing power of American women will help to shape the airline industry. Earhart concludes her book with a characteristically honest assessment of the ways in which her life has been changed by her sudden fame.

For the remainder of her life, Earhart campaigned tirelessly for the cause of women in flying. She participated in many cross-country air races, flew an autogyro (a forerunner of the helicopter), and was one of the founders of an organization of licensed women pilots, the Ninety-nine Club. In 1932, she was elected a member of the Society of Women Geographers. She also wrote a column on aviation for Cosmopolitan magazine. Her advice was sought by many airlines and airplane manufacturers, and she became a model for young women throughout the country.

In 1931, she married Putnam, who had been managing her career. Her second book, The Fun of It , was published in 1932. In it Earhart adds details about her childhood and further explains her attraction to flying, especially to unusual aerial maneuvers known as “stunting.”

I had fun trying to do [stunts] . . . so much so, in fact, I have sometimes thought that transport companies would do well to have a “recreation airplane” for their pilots who don’t have a chance to play in the big transports or while on duty. If a little stunt ship were available, the men could go up 5000 feet, and “turn it inside out” to relieve the monotony of hours of straight flying.

Her assurance that flying was safe and fun and her example as the first woman to fly the Atlantic alone increased her popularity with the public. Earhart’s solo flight from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, to Culmore, Ireland, May 21-22, 1932, won for her the Distinguished Flying Cross from the Congress of the United States, an award from the French Legion of Honor, and a medal from the National Geographic Society.

In 1935, she became the first person to fly alone from Hawaii to California and the first to fly nonstop from Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey. The trustees of Purdue University purchased a twin-engine Lockheed Electra for her, and she began to plan a round-the-world flight. After several false starts and minor accidents, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Miami, Florida, on June 1, 1937. A month of flying brought them across the Atlantic, Africa, and southern Asia to Lae, New Guinea. She and Noonan took off July 2, intending to land and refuel on tiny Howland Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Several hours later, the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, anchored off Howland Island, heard a radio message from Earhart that she was lost and running low on fuel. Neither the plane nor its pilot and navigator were ever found.

Because the Japanese claimed many of the islands in the mid-Pacific, rumors grew that Earhart and Noonan had crashed on a Japanese-held island and been captured and killed. After World War II, attempts were made to find the wreckage and confirm the rumors, but no convincing evidence had come to light. However, in late 2014, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) claimed that a small piece of aluminum plane wreckage discovered on a nearby island in 1991 could very well have belonged to Earhart's Electra. The group spotted a similar metal patch in the photograph of Earhart and her plane captured before taking off from Miami. They believe that the piece served as a modification in the field. To further support this connection, the group compared the patch's size, shape, and rivulet holes with an Electra being restored in Kansas, deeming it a match. This discovery would bolster the theory that the pilot and her navigator were forced to land on Nikumaroro after running out of fuel rather than crashing in the Pacific. While TIGHAR wants to travel back to Nikumaroro to see if an earlier anomoly found close to the island on sonar could be more of the wreckage, critics and skeptics have argued that there are still too many variables involved to make this possible link definitive.

Significance

Earhart was one of the most appealing heroes in an age of American hero worship. Like Lindbergh and Byrd, Earhart pioneered air travel by establishing flying records and opening new routes. Like Babe Didrikson Zaharias the athlete and Louise Arner Boyd the Arctic explorer, Earhart showed that women had a place in fields that were generally restricted to men.

Although she was criticized during her life for using her fame for profit at various times she promoted Lucky Strike cigarettes, luggage, and sports clothes Earhart remained essentially a private person. Because her parents believed that girls should have the same opportunities as boys, she was able to learn to fly. Because she believed that she should help others by sharing her experiences, she maintained a hectic schedule of flying and lecturing.

Once she had been given the opportunity to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, Earhart dedicated herself to flying. She was able to combine pleasure with business, and she worked hard at both. Success brought her into contact with other notable women from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to film star Mary Pickford. Earhart was also a celebrity, and her untimely death at the age of thirty-nine enshrined her in the hearts of her generation.

Earhart was a product of the social changes in the United States between the world wars. In many ways she epitomized her generation’s desire to break with the past and to create a better world. She captured something of that spirit in one of her poems, which begins,

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.The soul that knows it not, knows no releaseFrom little things;Knows not the livid loneliness of fearNor mountain heights, where bitter joy can hearThe sound of wings.

Bibliography

Backus, Jean L. Letters from Amelia: 1901–1937. Boston: Beacon, 1982. Print.

Earhart, Amelia. The Fun of It: Random Records of My Own Flying and of Women in Aviation. 1932. Reprint. Detroit: Gale Research, 1975. Print.

Earhart, Amelia. Last Flight. 1937. Reprint. Detroit: Gale Research, 1975. Print.

Earhart, Amelia. Twenty Hours Forty Minutes. 1928. Reprint. New York: Arno, 1980. Print.

Gillespie, Ric. Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance. Annapolis: Naval Inst., 2006. Print.

Loomis, Vincent V. Amelia Earhart: The Final Story. New York: Random, 1985. Print.

McCoy, Terrence. "The Metal Fragment That Could Solve the Mystery of Amelia Earhart's Disappearance." Washington Post. Washington Post, 30 Oct. 2014. Web. 13 Jan. 2015.

Morrissey, Muriel Earhart. Courage Is the Price. Wichita: McCormick, 1963. Print.

Pellegreno, Ann Holtgren. World Flight: The Earhart Trail. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1971. Print.

Putnam, George Palmer. Soaring Wings. New York: Harcourt, 1939. Print.

Van Pelt, Lori. Amelia Earhart: The Sky’s No Limit. New York: Forge, 2005. Print.