Amelia Earhart

The first airplane she saw, at the Iowa State Fair in 1908, struck her as a thing of rusty wire and wood, and she went back to the merry-go-round. What came after was less charming. Her father drank, the railroad let him go, and the family moved from one rented house to the next. She was in Toronto over Christmas 1917 when she took work as a nurse's aide at a military hospital, and the convalescing pilots there held her attention better than the medicine did. She caught the 1918 flu and spent months recovering from pneumonia. On December 28, 1920, she paid 10 dollars for a 10-minute ride over Long Beach and came down certain.

She hired Neta Snook for 12 hours of instruction at 500 dollars, bought a yellow Kinner Airster she called the Canary, and on October 22, 1922 took it to 14,000 feet for a women's altitude record. Then the flying stalled for years while she did social work in Boston. In June 1928 she crossed the Atlantic in the Friendship as a passenger and became famous for sitting still, which she never stopped resenting. She spent four years earning it. On May 20 and 21, 1932, she flew a single-engine Vega alone from Newfoundland to a pasture outside Derry through ice, a cracked exhaust manifold and a leaking fuel tank. In January 1935 she flew Honolulu to Oakland, which no one had done alone in either direction.

The flying was financed by a publicity operation her husband ran. George Putnam had chosen her for the Friendship partly because she photographed like Lindbergh, and afterward he kept her on lecture circuits and put her name on luggage, on a line of clothing cut for women who moved, on a brand of cigarettes. Purdue University supplied 50,000 dollars for the Lockheed Electra she called a flying laboratory. The first world attempt ended on the ground at Luke Field in Hawaii on March 17, 1937, when the plane ground-looped on takeoff and the landing gear collapsed. The repairs forced her to reverse the route, which meant finishing over the Pacific in the wrong season.

She left Lae, New Guinea, on July 1, 1937. The Coast Guard cutter Itasca heard her near Howland the next morning, loud and apparently unable to hear anything back. The Navy and Coast Guard search cost about 4 million dollars, the most expensive in American history to that point, and ran until July 19. A court declared her dead on January 5, 1939. The disappearance has since become an industry — crash and sink, castaway on Nikumaroro, capture by the Japanese — and roughly every decade a sonar image or a bone fragment revives one of them. Purdue, which bought the airplane, has an expedition to Nikumaroro due to sail in October 2026.

Amelia Earhart's life against the full span of the corpus.

• 20 Hrs., 40 Min.: Our Flight in the Friendship book
  Written fast, about a crossing she made as a passenger 1928
• The Ninety-Nines company
  The organization of women pilots she founded and first led 1930
• Solo transatlantic flight mission
  Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, to a field near Derry, in roughly 15 hours 1932
• The Fun of It book
  Part memoir, part argument for women in the air 1932
• Amelia Earhart Fashions company
  A clothing line she designed for women who worked 1933
• Last Flight book
  Assembled by George Putnam from her logs and dispatches 1937

• 1908 aged ~11 Sees her first airplane at the Iowa State Fair and finds it uninteresting
• December 1917 aged 20 Starts work as a nurse's aide at a Toronto military hospital The wounded pilots interested her more than the nursing did.
• December 28, 1920 aged 23 Pays 10 dollars for a 10-minute flight over Long Beach Frank Hawks flew it. She said she knew within a few hundred feet.
• October 22, 1922 aged 25 Sets a women's altitude record at 14,000 feet
• June 18, 1928 aged 30 Lands at Burry Port, Wales, after crossing as a passenger She compared herself to baggage. The fame arrived regardless.
• February 7, 1931 aged 33 Marries George P. Putnam at Noank, Connecticut
• May 21, 1932 aged 34 Lands alone in a pasture near Derry after crossing the Atlantic Ice, a cracked manifold and a leaking fuel tank on the way over.
• January 11, 1935 aged 37 Flies solo from Honolulu to Oakland The first person of either sex to make the crossing alone.
• July 2, 1937 aged 39 Disappears near Howland Island with navigator Fred Noonan The search ran until July 19 and cost about 4 million dollars.

• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. friend
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. ordered the search for her
• Wilbur Wright 1867–1912
  Co-inventor of the first successful powered airplane and pioneer of aeronautical engineering. influenced by
• Orville Wright 1871–1948
  Co-inventor of the first successful powered airplane, achieving human flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. influenced by
• Sally Ride 1951–2012
  First American woman in space and physicist who flew on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983. successor in the air