She survived the Spanish Flu of 1918 but was left with a sinus condition that plagued her for the rest of her life.
Her sinuses did not stop her, however, from becoming the first woman to make a nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, an act for which Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross.
With her strong physical likeness to Charles Lindbergh, she became “Lady Lindy” to the headline writers of the Fourth Estate—or “Queen of the Air,” dubbed so by the United Press wire service.
She and navigator Fred Noonan went missing over the Pacific Ocean in July 1937, prompting a search of unprecedented scale. But the search came up empty.
Rumors of her fate still tease us, almost ninety years later.
Amelia’s Early Life
Amelia Mary Earhart was born in Acheson, Kansas, in 1897 and grew up there and in Des Moines, Iowa. She and her younger sister, Muriel, got an unconventional upbringing, as their mother had no desire to raise “nice little ladies.”
Amelia—nicknamed “Meeley” or “Millie”—sought out adventure and achievement. A voracious reader drawn to science and mechanics, she took charge of her own education. When her family moved to Chicago, she rejected the high school closest to home and instead went to Hyde Park High School, which had the best science program.
According to Wikipedia, “she kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about successful women in predominantly male-oriented fields, including film direction and production, law, advertising, management, and mechanical engineering.”
She continually sought advancement in fields then dominated by men. After stints as a nurse’s aide, a pre-med student, a photographer, truck driver, and stenographer, she took seriously to flying. In 1921, after twelve hours of flight instruction from female aviator Neta Snook, Amelia cropped her hair short and bought a leather flying coat. Almost as soon as she took up flying, she drew up plans for an organization of female aviators.
She purchased a chromium yellow Kinner Airster biplane and named it “The Canary.” In 1922, at the age of twenty-five, she flew the Canary to an altitude of 14,000 feet, a world record for female pilots. The following year she became the sixteenth woman in the United States granted a pilot’s license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the governing body of sports aviation.
Her life became a blur of flying, coupled with nonstop promotion of flight in general and flight by women in particular. She went ahead and started her dreamed-of female fliers’ group, which came to be known as The Ninety-nines and today has 6,500 members.
She had a gift for promotion. Merely flying the Atlantic as a passenger in a plane flown by pilot Wilmer Stultz was enough to merit a ticker tape parade in Manhattan, followed by a reception with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House. Publisher George Putnam sponsored a promotional campaign which included publishing a book she authored, arranging a series of lecture tours, and using her likeness in various product advertisements. Putnam, her senior by a decade, proposed marriage six times and eventually became her husband.
In 1932, she made her own solo crossing of the Atlantic in a Lockheed Vega 5B.
She continued to push for the acceptance of women in all aviation-related roles, from passengers to pilots and engineers. She flew in air races, served as an official of the National Aeronautic Association, and set a world altitude record of 18,415 feet at the controls of a Pitcairn PCA-2 autogyro.
In 1935 she joined Purdue University “as a visiting faculty member to counsel women on careers and as a technical advisor to its Department of Aeronautics.” In that same year she began to promote “one flight which I most wanted to attempt—a circumnavigation of the globe as near its waistline as could be.”
Circumnavigation
It took a couple of years to get the project together. In 1936, with financing from Purdue, she acquired a custom-built Lockheed Electra 10E, a twin-engined monoplane, its fuselage modified to accommodate many additional fuel tanks.
She chose Captain Harry Manning to accompany her on the round-the-world flight as navigator. Later, with reservations about Manning’s navigating skills, Amelia replaced him with Fred Noonan, a licensed ship’s captain and experienced marine and airline navigator. He had recently left the employ of Pan American Airlines, having laid out and pioneered most of Pan Am’s routes for flying boat service across the Pacific, as well as training the other navigators who would fly those routes regularly.
After her first attempt, flying east to west, failed due to an accident on the ground in Honolulu, Earhart had the plane repaired and then took off with Noonan, this time flying west to east. They flew from Miami and after a month-long series of hops across South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, arrived at Lae, New Guinea, on June 29, 1937.
They departed from Lae on July 2, bound for Howland Island in the mid-South Pacific, some 2,500 miles away—the longest leg of the journey. The flight was expected to take about twenty hours and would use up most of the plane’s 1,100 gallons of aviation gasoline, leaving little room for navigational error.
Besides Noonan’s vaunted skill at celestial navigation using a nautical sextant, there was a provision for radio navigation, based on a homing signal from the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Itasca, which was parked off Howland Island for that precise purpose.
At the expected arrival time, the Itasca heard Earhart’s voice in a loud, clear signal indicating she was nearby, but two-way communication could not be established. She stated she could not find the radio homing signal.
An hour after Amelia’s last message was received, Itasca began to search north and west of the island, assuming the plane had gone down in the ocean nearby. They found nothing. Over the next three days the U.S. Navy sent other assets to the search area, finally dispatching the battleship Colorado from Hawaii, where it had been in the middle of a summer training cruise for Naval ROTC students from Washington and California. The Colorado’s three O3U-3 biplanes flew search patterns around Howland Island. They also searched the Phoenix Islands south of Howland Island, focusing on Gardner Island (now called Nikumaroro).
Nothing was found.
The official search ended July 19, just five days short of Amelia’s fortieth birthday. After the Navy called off the search, her husband, George Putnam, ordered further searches with chartered boats. A year and a half after her last radio call, Amelia Earhart was declared legally dead.
And So?
There are half a million theories on what went wrong. The most prominent ones are summarized at great length by Wikipedia. What it all boils down to is . . . nobody knows.
The most recent lead comes from Deep Sea Vision, a Charleston, South Carolina company that operates unmanned underwater vehicles. Early this year, their underwater drone captured a plane-like image of the right size on the sea floor about 16,000 feet underwater, in the ocean near Howland Island. But another expedition will be required to corroborate or invalidate the find.
Tom D. Crouch, senior curator of the National Air and Space Museum, has called Amelia Earhart “our favorite missing person.”
For now, pending new updates, she remains in that role, as apostrophized in song by Red River Dave McEnery: “Farewell, First Lady of the Air.”
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
