Amelia Earhart

Their life

American aviation pioneer and the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. A record-setter and tireless advocate for women in flight, she disappeared over the Pacific in 1937 attempting to circumnavigate the globe — leaving a legacy of courage and possibility.

Known for

• First woman to fly the Atlantic solo
• Numerous aviation speed and distance records
• Co-founding the Ninety-Nines for women pilots
• Advocate for women entering aviation
• Bestselling author of flight memoirs
• Vanishing during 1937 world-flight attempt

The road they walked

Amelia Earhart was born in 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, to a family whose fortunes rose and fell with her father's drinking and shifting jobs, which meant a childhood of frequent moves and an early independence. She was an unconventional girl—climbing trees, collecting worms, keeping a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about women succeeding in male-dominated fields long before she ever touched an airplane. During World War I she worked as a nurse's aide in Toronto, tending wounded soldiers and airmen, and it was there she first watched military pilots training overhead. A ten-minute plane ride in California in 1920 sealed it; she scraped together flying lessons with one of the era's few female instructors, Neta Snook, and bought her own secondhand biplane, which she named the Canary.

She came of age alongside American aviation itself, a field still dangerous and unregulated, thick with barnstormers and record chasers competing for a public hungry for spectacle. In 1928, publisher and promoter George Putnam recruited her to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air—as a passenger, not a pilot—and the flight made her instantly famous, dubbed 'Lady Lindy' in the press. Uneasy with fame built on someone else's piloting, she spent the next years closing that gap: setting women's speed and altitude records, helping found the Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots, and marrying Putnam in 1931 on terms she insisted remain a 'partnership' rather than a conventional marriage. She also worked as a career counselor for women at Purdue University, using her visibility to open doors in fields that had largely excluded them.

The turning point came in May 1932, when she flew solo across the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland, becoming the first woman to do so and only the second person after Charles Lindbergh. More records followed—first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the mainland United States in 1935, transcontinental speed marks—each one building toward her final, most ambitious project: a circumnavigation of the globe near the equator, the longest such flight ever attempted. She set out in 1937 with navigator Fred Noonan in a twin-engine Lockheed Electra, and by July had completed all but the final quarter of the journey.

How their story ended

On July 2, 1937, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the central Pacific while searching for tiny Howland Island, their refueling stop on the round-the-world flight. Their last confirmed radio transmissions, received by the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, described dwindling fuel and difficulty locating the island; then contact ceased. A massive U.S. Navy search turned up nothing, and she was declared legally dead in 1939. What happened next remains genuinely disputed: most historians conclude the Electra ran out of fuel and went down at sea, while a minority point to physical evidence suggesting she and Noonan may have reached Nikumaroro atoll and died there as castaways. No wreckage has ever been conclusively identified, and the disappearance remains one of the twentieth century's enduring mysteries.

In their words

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