![\"Amelia](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/b\/bc\/Amelia_Earhart_1935.jpg\/800px-Amelia_Earhart_1935.jpg\")
A World That Told Her No<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Earhart grew up in Atchison, Kansas, in a family that encouraged her independence while the culture around her insisted women had no business in cockpits. She saw her first aeroplane at the Iowa State Fair in 1907 and found it unimpressive. She didn't catch the flying bug until 1920, when a friend took her for a ten-minute joyride over Los Angeles. \"By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground,\" she later wrote, \"I knew I had to fly.\"<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
She took her first flying lesson from Neta Snook \u2014 one of the few female instructors in the country \u2014 in January 1921. She worked a string of jobs to pay for the lessons: truck driver, photographer's assistant, stenographer. Six months after her first lesson, she bought her first aircraft. A year later, she set her first record: the women's altitude record, at 14,000 feet. The aviation world noticed. The rest of the world was still catching up.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\n
\n\u201cThe most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity.\u201d\n<\/p>\n\u2014 Amelia Earhart<\/cite>\n<\/div>\n\r\n\r\n\r\n In June 1928, Earhart crossed the Atlantic \u2014 as a passenger, she was always careful to say, not as a pilot. Wilmer Stultz flew the aircraft. But the publicity made her famous anyway, and she hated it. \"I was just baggage,\" she said. \"Like a sack of potatoes.\" She spent the next four years working toward the real crossing.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n On May 20, 1932 \u2014 exactly five years after Lindbergh \u2014 Earhart took off from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, alone, in a Lockheed Vega. Fourteen hours and fifty-six minutes later, she landed in a field near Londonderry, Northern Ireland, having become the first woman \u2014 and only the second person \u2014 to fly the Atlantic solo. She also set a new record for the fastest transatlantic crossing. She was met by a startled farmer who asked if she had come far. \"From America,\" she said.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The records kept coming. In January 1935, she became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California \u2014 a crossing considered more dangerous than the Atlantic because there were no landmarks and no margin for error. She set seven women's speed and altitude records during her career. She co-founded The Ninety-Nines, an organisation of female pilots that still exists today with 5,500 members worldwide. She was appointed as a visiting faculty member at Purdue University and used the position to design what was then the world's most advanced flight research laboratory.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The around-the-world attempt was Earhart's most ambitious undertaking. The route she chose \u2014 the longest possible, roughly following the equator \u2014 covered 29,000 miles. She and Noonan completed 22,000 of them before the final leg. Their Lockheed Electra 10E was equipped with state-of-the-art radio navigation equipment, but the combination of equipment limitations, antenna problems, and the challenge of finding a tiny coral island in the middle of the ocean proved fatal.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The US Coast Guard cutter Itasca<\/em> was stationed at Howland Island to guide them in by radio. The transmissions Earhart sent were received \u2014 fragmentary, apparently confused about frequencies \u2014 but she could not hear the Itasca's responses. Her last transmission, sent at 08:43 local time on July 2, 1937, reported clouds and gave a line of position. Then nothing.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The theories multiplied almost immediately: she crashed at sea, she landed on a reef and died stranded, she was captured by the Japanese and used as a spy, she survived and returned to America under a different name. None has been proven. The most likely explanation remains the simplest: she ran out of fuel and came down in the ocean, and the debris field sank into 17,000 feet of water where it will almost certainly remain forever.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Earhart herself had considered the possibility. \"When I go,\" she wrote to her husband George Putnam before the final attempt, \"I would like best to go in my plane.\" The sky had given her everything. It was probably fitting, if not fair, that it kept her in the end.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\nThe Records That Rewrote What Was Possible<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The Last Flight<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n