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| Amelia Earhart (The Grand Island Independent. June 18, 1928) |
In June 1928, Amelia Earhart flew across the Atlantic. Sort of. She was in the airplane, and she crossed the ocean, but she didn’t do much flying. Wilmer Stultz piloted the plane. Louis Gordon was the mechanic.
Amelia sat in the back of the Fokker Friendship, kept the log, and helped where she could. The flight took over twenty hours. When they landed in Wales, the reporters didn’t care much about Stultz or Gordon.
They wanted Amelia.
She was the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane. Within days, Amelia Earhart was famous.
There was just one problem. She knew she hadn’t really done it. “The boys did all the flying,” she said, describing herself as something close to baggage.
The newspapers weren’t so careful about the distinction.
The Belvidere Daily Republican announced, “WOMAN SUCCEEDS IN FLYING ATLANTIC OCEAN.” Other papers treated Earhart as though she had conquered the Atlantic herself. A Buffalo newspaper photograph was more accurate. Its caption identified “Louis Gordon, mechanic; Miss Amelia Earhart, Boston girl passenger; and Wilmer Stultz, pilot.”
Boston girl passenger. That was what she actually was.
Amelia didn’t pretend otherwise. Writing about the flight immediately afterward, she explained why she had gone. “Why did I do it?” she asked. “When one is offered such a tremendous adventure it would be no instinct to refuse it.”
That bothered her. She was already a pilot. She knew the difference between riding across the Atlantic and flying across it. Four years later, she tried again. This time she went alone.
That flight made her one of the best-known pilots in the world. But the story didn’t start over the Atlantic. It started years earlier in California with another woman pilot named Neta Snook.
Amelia Mary Earhart was born July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas. Nothing about her childhood suggested she was going to become America’s most famous woman pilot. She wasn’t even interested in airplanes.
Amelia saw one at a state fair when she was about ten. It was little more than wood, cloth, wire, and an engine.
She wasn’t impressed. She had other interests.
Amelia and her younger sister Muriel climbed trees, explored, and did things girls supposedly weren’t supposed to do. She also kept newspaper clippings about women who became doctors, lawyers, and engineers. She seemed interested in women doing unusual things long before she became one of them.
World War I changed everything. Earhart went to Toronto, where she trained as a nurse’s aide and worked around wounded soldiers returning from Europe. Some were pilots.
Aviation was suddenly harder to ignore.
Before the war, airplanes had mostly been experiments, toys, and fairground attractions. During the war, thousands of young men learned to fly them. Afterward, those pilots came home and started flying schools, carried passengers, and became barnstormers. Some of them died doing it.
Aviation in 1920 wasn’t safe. That was part of the attraction.
In December 1920, pilot Frank Hawks took Amelia up for a ride. It lasted only about ten minutes, but that was enough.
She wanted to fly.
Finding someone to teach her brought Amelia to Neta Snook. Snook was from Iowa and only a little older than Amelia, but she already had something Earhart wanted. Experience. She had studied aviation, worked around airplanes, and learned to fly when very few women in America had done any of those things.
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| Neta Snook taught Amelia Earhart how to fly. (Los Angeles Evening Post-Record. July 13, 1921) |
Amelia began taking lessons from Snook in 1921. The lessons weren’t glamorous. There were no big records, reporters or crowds waiting when Amelia climbed out of the airplane. She was just another student trying to figure out how to fly.
But she didn’t stay completely anonymous for long. On December 15, 1921, the Pasadena Star-Newsran a photograph under the headline, “WOMEN AVIATORS PROMISE TO COMPETE IN AIR RODEO HERE.” The caption identified “Miss Amelia Earhart in Plane” as one woman entered in the coming air rodeo.
It was a tiny beginning. No, Lady Lindy. No Atlantic. No ticker-tape parade. Just Amelia Earhart sitting in an airplane at a California flying field, her name appearing in a newspaper because she was one of a handful of women trying to fly.
And apparently she wasn’t especially good at it. She made mistakes. She practiced, scared herself once in a while, and went back up. Flying also cost money, and Amelia didn’t have enough of it. So she worked. She took whatever jobs she could find and poured much of what she earned into flying. Before long she wanted her own airplane.
She bought a used Kinner Airster and painted it bright yellow, and called it the Canary.
In October 1922, Amelia took the airplane to 14,000 feet, setting a women’s altitude record. The next year she received an international pilot’s license.
Then she almost quit.
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| Within a year of learning to fly, Amelia Earhart was working the barnstorming circuit. (Pasadena Star News. December 15, 1921) |
Money problems hit the family. Her parents separated, and Amelia sold the Canary. She moved east with her mother, and for a few years, flying looked like something she had done rather than something she was going to spend her life doing.
She didn’t exactly sit around waiting for aviation to find her again. In Boston, Amelia worked as a social worker at Denison House, helping immigrant families. She taught English and spent her days dealing with problems that had nothing to do with airplanes. She also found her way back into aviation whenever she could. By the time the Atlantic opportunity came along, she had hundreds of hours in the air.
Then Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic.
Lindbergh left New York in May 1927. A 25-year-old pilot, almost nobody outside aviation had heard of. Thirty-three hours later, he landed in Paris and became one of the most famous people on Earth. His flight changed aviation almost overnight.
Suddenly everybody wanted another Lindbergh. Another ocean. Another record. Another first.
One possibility was obvious. A woman crossing the Atlantic.
Several women were already trying. Wealthy American Amy Phipps Guest had considered making the flight, but her family wasn’t thrilled with the idea. So another plan developed. Find a woman to go instead.
Amelia got the call. Would she like to fly the Atlantic? The airplane would be the Friendship, a Fokker trimotor, but there was a catch. Amelia would not fly it.
Wilmer Stultz would do that. It didn’t matter much to the publicity people. Amelia was young, thin, short-haired, and looked a little like Lindbergh.
The newspapers noticed. Soon they were calling her Lady Lindy.
They also began building an image around her almost immediately. On June 18, while the Atlantic flight was still front-page news, the Imperial Valley Press called Earhart a “SPLENDID TYPE OF MODERN AMERICAN GIRL.” The story said she combined “the charm and determined daring of Lindbergh” with the “beauty and independence of the modern American college girl.”
It was a strange mixture of aviation and celebrity. The newspaper told readers that Amelia was thirty, tall and slender, wore her light curly hair bobbed, worked as a social worker, had been a wartime nurse’s aide and had studied at Columbia. It also pointed out something easily lost in all the talk about her appearance. She already had about 500 hours in the air.
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| Amelia Earhart (The Ottawa Citizen. June 18, 1928) |
Amelia wasn’t just a pretty face Putnam had stuffed into an airplane.
On June 17, 1928, the Friendship left Newfoundland. Twenty hours later, it reached Wales. Amelia stepped out of the airplane and into an entirely different life.
There were newspaper stories, photographs, parades, and lectures. She went to the White House. A book followed. So did speaking tours.
The speed of it must have been strange. One day she was a social worker from Boston who flew airplanes. A few days later strangers wanted her autograph, and newspapers wanted to know what she thought about everything. Stultz and Gordon had actually flown the Friendship, but it was Amelia whose face Americans remembered.
Amelia Earhart had become a national celebrity because she rode across the Atlantic. She knew that wasn’t enough. Over the next few years, she worked on becoming the pilot people already thought she was.
She flew constantly, raced, and set records. She wrote about aviation and became the aviation editor for Cosmopolitan. She also learned how fame worked.
Amelia was good with reporters. She was comfortable in front of crowds, and looked the way Americans thought a modern aviator should look. She didn’t run from the publicity. She used it.
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| (Belvidere Daily Republican. June 18, 1928) |
The publicity also gave her a platform, and she increasingly used it to talk about women. By October 1929, the Paducah Sun was running a full-page feature with Amelia’s face across the top and the headline, “Give Woman a Chance in the Air — Pleads Amelia Earhart.”
Her argument was simple. Women weren’t physically or mentally incapable of flying airplanes. They hadn’t been given the same opportunities to learn.
“There is nothing in woman’s make-up which would make her inferior to a man as an air pilot,” she argued. “The only barrier to her swift success is her lack of opportunity to receive proper training.”
Earhart knew something about proper training. Eight years earlier, when she needed someone to teach her, she had found Neta Snook.
She was also thinking beyond women sitting behind the controls. Commercial aviation was still trying to convince ordinary Americans that airplanes were transportation rather than dangerous machines flown by daredevils. Women mattered to that argument. If women became comfortable flying as passengers, the airplane had a better chance of becoming part of everyday life.
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| Louis Gordon, Amelia Earhartnd Wilmer Stultz. (The Buffalo News. June 18, 1928) |
In 1929, Amelia entered the Women’s Air Derby from California to Cleveland. The newspapers gave it another name: the Powder Puff Derby. The women pilots weren’t particularly happy about that.
They weren’t taking a Sunday ride. They were racing airplanes across the country when airplanes broke down regularly, and emergency landings were part of the business. Amelia finished third in her class.
Something else came out of the race.
The women pilots realized how few of them there were, and how scattered they were around the country. Later that year, they formed an organization. Ninety-nine licensed women joined.
They called themselves the Ninety-Nines. Amelia became the group’s first president. By then, she was more than a pilot. She was becoming the public face of women in aviation.
And she was becoming something else. A celebrity.
By December 1930, the Star Tribune wasn’t interviewing her simply about airplanes. Jane Dixon’s feature was called “As One Woman to Another — Amelia Earhart.” The very idea of the story said something about how much had changed. Readers weren’t merely interested in where Amelia Earhart flew. They wanted to know what she thought.
That was an unusual position for a woman pilot who, less than a decade earlier, had been paying Neta Snook a dollar a minute to teach her how to keep an airplane in the sky.
There was another person behind much of the Amelia Earhart story. George Palmer Putnam was a publisher who understood newspapers and promotion. He also understood that Amelia Earhart was a great story.
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| The Paducah Sun. October 27, 1929) |
Putnam had helped organize publicity around the 1928 Atlantic flight. Afterward, he helped turn Earhart’s fame into books, lectures, and endorsements.
Eventually, he wanted to marry her.
Amelia wasn’t interested. At least not at first. Putnam kept asking, and she kept saying no. Finally, in 1931, she said yes.
Even then she wasn’t interested in becoming Mrs. George Putnam. She kept the name Amelia Earhart. Before the wedding, she wrote Putnam a letter clarifying that she didn’t expect a conventional marriage. She wanted her independence, and most of all she wanted to keep flying.
That relationship was complicated. Putnam was her husband, but he was also her promoter, publisher, and business partner. He helped create the public Amelia Earhart, and Amelia was hardly an unwilling participant. They both understood that keeping airplanes in the air required money, and keeping Amelia in the newspapers helped produce it.
The next year she showed exactly what that meant.
On May 20, 1932, Amelia took off from Newfoundland in a red Lockheed Vega. Her destination was Paris. She was alone. No Stultz. No Gordon. Nobody else to fly the airplane if she got tired, scared, or lost. Just her.
The flight went bad almost from the start. There was bad weather and ice. The altimeter gave her trouble. Fuel leaked. At one point, the Vega went into a spin.
There was another problem. The exhaust system cracked. Flames began shooting from the side of the airplane. A Massachusetts newspaper put that part of the story right across its front page: “AMELIA EARHART FLIES OCEAN DEFYING MENACE OF FLAMES IN MOTOR.”
There wasn’t much Amelia could do about any of it. She was alone over the Atlantic. She kept flying.
Paris wasn’t looking very important anymore. Getting back on the ground was.
After almost fifteen hours, she brought the Vega down in a pasture in Northern Ireland. It was far short of Paris, but safely on the ground.
The flight wasn’t what she had planned. It was still enough.
Amelia Earhart had become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. She was also the first person since Lindbergh to make the crossing alone. Nobody could call her baggage this time.
That’s the difference between 1928 and 1932. The first time Earhart crossed the Atlantic, a newspaper caption could accurately call her the “Boston girl passenger.” Four years later there was only one person in the airplane.
Her.
She received the Distinguished Flying Cross. France gave her the Legion of Honor. There were more parades, more headlines, and more photographs. This time the attention had been earned in the cockpit.
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| Amelia Earhart (Public Opinion. June 18, 1928) |
Amelia could have stopped there. She didn’t.
Later in 1932, she became the first woman to fly nonstop across the United States. Then she started looking toward the Pacific. Hawaii to California was one of those flights where there wasn’t much room for error.
Pilots had already died trying it. There was a lot of water between Honolulu and California, and nowhere to land if the engine decided it was done. Amelia tried anyway.
On January 11, 1935, she took off from Honolulu. Eighteen hours later, she landed in Oakland. This one was different. She wasn’t the first woman to do it. She was the first person.
That was where Amelia wanted to be. She didn’t want to be good “for a woman.” She wanted to do things nobody had done.
Thousands were waiting when she reached Oakland. The Salt Lake Tribune put the reception across the top of the page: “ENTHUSIASTIC THRONG WELCOMES AVIATRIX.” The flight itself had taken roughly eighteen hours. Amelia had spent most of that time alone with an engine, instruments, darkness, and several thousand miles of Pacific Ocean.
Then she landed and walked straight back into the crowd.
The contrast was becoming part of her life. Long stretches completely alone in an airplane, followed by reporters, photographers, speeches, and people trying to get close enough to see her. She seemed able to live in both worlds.
The next day’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram was interested in something besides the record. Its headline read, “Amelia Here Predicted Big Things for Women.” Years after she first began talking about giving women a chance in aviation, she was still talking about it.
Amelia Earhart (Birmingham Post-Herald. July 24, 1928)
Amelia wasn’t asking other women to take risks she avoided herself. Every new flight put her argument back in front of the public. Women could fly airplanes. Women could navigate long distances. Women could do things that were still widely treated as men’s work.
Later that year, she flew from Los Angeles to Mexico City. Then Mexico City to Newark. Another flight. Another record.
By the middle of the 1930s, Amelia Earhart was everywhere. Flying wasn’t cheap, and neither were airplanes.
She found ways to pay for both.
She wrote books, gave lectures, endorsed products, and appeared in advertisements. Her picture sold products. So did her name.
It can look strange now, but it was part of how she kept flying. Records created publicity. Publicity created money. Money bought airplanes and fuel. Those airplanes created more records.
Amelia understood the cycle. George Putnam certainly understood it. Together, they turned Amelia Earhart into something close to a brand before people commonly used the word that way.
But there was more to it than money. Amelia kept pushing one idea. Women ought to get a chance.
Not just in airplanes.
That wasn’t something she came up with late in her career. Back in 1929, when newspapers were still treating women pilots as curiosities and calling their races “Powder Puff” events, Earhart was already arguing that ability wasn’t the problem. Opportunity was.
That makes her more interesting than the cardboard version of Amelia Earhart that came later. She enjoyed the publicity and knew how to use it. She sold books, clothes, and luggage. She posed for pictures and gave interviews. At the same time, she was trying to use the attention to pry open doors that had mostly been closed to women.
Amelia Earhart, "Lady Lindy," got a chance to drive a locomotive in
New York. (The Pittsburgh Press. July 24, 1928)
In 1935, Purdue University brought her to campus. She worked with women students, encouraging them to think about careers that weren’t normally open to them. Engineering. Science. Business. Aviation.
She also worked with Purdue’s aviation program. Purdue was serious about flying and had its own airport. That relationship would become important because Amelia was thinking about another flight.
A much bigger one.
In 1936, there weren’t many records left that seemed big enough for Amelia. So she picked one that was.
Around the world.
She wouldn’t be the first person to circle the globe by airplane. Her plan was different. She wanted to fly a route close to the equator, nearly 29,000 miles.
For that, she needed another airplane. Purdue helped make it possible. Amelia acquired a Lockheed Electra 10E, a twin-engine airplane fitted with extra fuel tanks for long-distance flying.
She called it her “flying laboratory.”
She also needed a navigator. That job went to Fred Noonan.
Noonan went to sea as a teenager and spent over 20 years aboard ships. He sailed around Cape Horn several times and eventually earned a master’s license. During World War I, he survived ships lost at sea.
In the early 1930s, Noonan traded ships for airplanes. He went to work for Pan American Airways and became one of its top navigators, helping to map routes across the Pacific for Pan Am’s Clipper flying boats.
That experience made him a natural choice for Amelia Earhart’s flight around the world. She needed someone who knew how to navigate thousands of miles over the open ocean. Noonan had been doing that most of his adult life.
The first world-flight attempt began in March 1937. Amelia flew from California to Hawaii with Noonan and other crew members. The next destination was Howland Island.
On March 18, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin carried a huge headline: “AMELIA READY FOR HOWLAND HOP.”
There is something unsettling about seeing it now. Howland was just another stop in a flight that was supposed to continue around the world. Nobody reading that newspaper knew that within four months the words Amelia Earhart and Howland Island would be tied together forever.
She never made that March flight to Howland.
The first world-flight attempt ended in Hawaii when the Electra crashed during takeoff at Luke Field. Nobody was seriously injured, but the airplane was badly damaged.
The Electra was shipped back to California and repaired.
She could have walked away. The airplane had been wrecked underneath her before she’d even reached the most dangerous part of the trip. She already had more records than almost any pilot alive and nothing left to prove to the public.
She went back.
This time the route changed direction.
On June 1, 1937, Amelia and Noonan left Miami and headed east. South America came first, then Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Guinea.
The Electra kept moving.
By the end of June, they had flown about 22,000 miles. Most of the trip was behind them. Then came Howland Island.
Howland was tiny. About two miles long and less than a mile wide. It was a strip of dirt sitting in the middle of the very large Pacific Ocean.
Miss it by a little and there wasn’t anything else around.
On July 2, Amelia and Noonan left Lae, New Guinea. They had enough fuel to reach Howland. The Coast Guard cutter Itasca was waiting near the island to help guide them in.
The Electra never appeared.
Amelia’s radio transmissions came through during the morning. She sounded close. The Itasca could hear her, but she apparently couldn’t hear the Itasca.
That was a big problem.
Then came the messages everyone remembers. They couldn’t see the island. They were running low on fuel. Amelia reported flying along a north-south line, looking for Howland.
Then the radio went quiet.
The next morning Americans opened their newspapers and watched the confusion unfold almost in real time. The Buffalo News filled much of its July 3 page with Earhart. A map traced the route she had already flown around the world and showed the search area in the Pacific.
Around it were headlines that told the story better than anyone could after the fact.
“AMELIA REPORTS HER LAST NIGHT.”
“EARHART RADIO HEARD.”
“AMELIA BELIEVED ON CORAL ISLAND.”
Nobody knew.
That is easy to forget now because we already know the ending. The people reading those newspapers didn’t. Amelia might be floating somewhere. She might have put the Electra down on an island. A radio signal might be hers. A ship might find her tomorrow.
On July 4, the Tampa Bay Times mentioned another possibility: “Man Who Mapped Route Believes Amelia May Be on Atoll.”
Hope hadn’t disappeared yet. Neither had the rumors.
The United States went looking for them. It became one of the largest searches ever mounted for a missing airplane. Ships and airplanes covered hundreds of thousands of square miles of the Pacific.
They found nothing.
The official search ended later that month. George Putnam kept looking, but he didn’t find anything either.
For Putnam, this wasn’t simply the disappearance of a famous pilot he managed. His wife was gone. There was no wreckage, no body, and no answer. He had helped turn Amelia into one of the most recognizable women in the world, but none of that could tell him where she was.
A few months later, newspapers were already beginning to turn Amelia Earhart from a missing person into a memory. On December 4, 1937, the Vancouver Province devoted a large feature to Putnam’s account under the headline, “My Life With Amelia Earhart.”
The subhead reached all the way back to the beginning of her fame, describing her as the woman who first flew the Atlantic as a “Sack of Potatoes.”
It was a strange circle. The phrase that had once captured Amelia’s frustration with being a passenger was now part of the story of her life.
Amelia Earhart was declared legally dead in 1939. She was 39 years old when she disappeared.
That should probably be where the story ends. Instead, it is where another story began.
People have been trying to solve the mystery ever since. The
simplest explanation is still the obvious one. Amelia and Noonan couldn’t find
Howland, ran out of fuel, and went into the Pacific.
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