AMELIA EARHART – NAVIGATING A NEW FLIGHTPATH FOR WOMEN
None of us know in advance what moments will change or influence the path of our lives. For Amelia Earhart, the moment was probably when, as a young girl, she was “buzzed” by a stunt plane at a flying exhibition in Toronto. The pilot, just having some fun with the spectators, flew low across a field, right at Amelia and a friend. He
r friend dove from the attack, but Amelia stood her ground defiantly and the plane veered away. She later said that she thought the little red plane “spoke to her” as it flew above her.
Perhaps it did.
There was little in Amelia’s childhood to suggest that she would become one of the most famous women in the world and a pioneer. Born in 1897 in Kansas, she grew up in middle class, rural America. She loved the outdoors, and was a bit of what people then called a “tomboy”, happy to play rough and tumble games outside with her sister.
Her mother was a very independent thinker, and she passed her attitude down to her girls. As a teenager, Amelia kept a scrapbook of stories about successful women who had “made it “ as lawyers, filmmakers, executives, and engineers in the totally male-dominated society of the time
At first, it looked like her career path would be medicine, as she became a nurse’s aide at age 20 in a Toronto hospital, caring for wounded soldiers returning from WW1.
But 3 years later, while at an airfield in Long Beach, CA with her father, Amelia took her first plane ride. By the time she was a hundred feet off the ground, she was hooked.
She enrolled in flying lessons, bought a leather jacket, and cut her hair short to give herself the look of other female pilots. Six months later she bought her first plane: a bright yellow used Kinner Airster biplane which she nicknamed “The Canary”.
In October 1922 she flew the Canary to a height of 14,000 feet, setting a world record for female pilots. The following year she became the 16th woman in history to receive an international pilot’s license.
Ever the iconoclast, Earhart refused to don typical flying gear. When she flew, she wore a suit or dress instead of the "high-bread aviation togs," a close-fitting hat instead of a helmet, didn't put on her goggles until she taxied to the end of the field, and removed them immediately upon landing.
Though she spent the next few years as a teacher and social worker, she never gave up her dreams of flying. But becoming a fulltime pilot was an expensive undertaking, one that very few women in the world even considered attempting. Air travel was a new field, one that was viewed as a male vocation with great risk attached.
Perhaps bolstered by the stories of pioneering women she had collected as a teenager, she was undeterred. In 1928, following in the steps of Charles Lindberg’s historic solo flight, Amelia became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by plane…though only as a passenger, not as the pilot.
Like so many people who followed her, she realized that if she wanted to fund her love of flight, she needed to be in the public eye. So upon her return she hired a publicity genius who would become her husband – G.P.Putnam. She published a book about her experiences and took to the lecture circuit.
She was an early supporter of commercial air travel, and as an increasingly well-known public figure, had a great influence convincing a skeptical public that air travel was safe. She saw aviation as the way of the future with huge commercial potential. But most of America was still smitten with another invention - the automobile.
But her passion for flight drove her on. Just as Ford had shown the world that cars could be made affordable for average Americans, she proved that commercial flight was viable by helping set up the first air shuttle service between New York and Washington. She also became Vice President of what would become Northeast Airlines.
She stood out as a smart, independent, courageous woman in a male dominated world. She took a job as associate editor at Cosmopolitan, where she campaigned for a greater public acceptance of aviation and focused on the roles of women in society.
In 1929 she founded and became the first president of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots that still exists today.
Behind the scenes, Putnam worked to create the Earhart “brand” as a force in the public psyche. To help finance her flying, Amelia did product endorsements, marketed a line of clothing and sportswear, and even started her own line of durable luggage. She was one of the most recognized faces in the world and a champion of women’s rights..
But she had more flying records to break. The world was changed when Charles Lindbergh made the first solo crossing of the Atlantic. A few years later, in 1932, Amelia showed that a woman could stand the grueling and courageous challenge as well, flying from Newfoundland to Ireland through horrific storms. She entered history books as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, earning her the Distinguished Flying Cross.
But she did not stop there. Her passion for flying was insatiable. And she increasingly seemed to be fearless in the sky. Perhaps that little red plane really had talked to her as a child.
In 1935 she became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to Oakland, accomplishing something that even a male pilot never had. No longer just a pioneering ‘woman’, she was now a universal hero in the culture of the time, and a global celebrity.
In 1937 she declared her intention to circumnavigate the globe. This was a hugely risky proposition. Planes at the time had limited fuel and distance capacity, and airports were not exactly in every city around the world – and that’s where there were cities!
Radio communication and navigation technology were primitive. In the tiny cargo capacity of a plane, not only did an adventurer have to take tools and primitive repair capabilities in case of trouble, but personal items, food and water.
It was too big a challenge to try alone. So this would be a duo flight, with Amelia as pilot and friend Fred Noonan as navigator.
They stopped in New Guinea, 3⁄4 of the way along their quest. But the last leg was the most difficult, a 7,000 mile stretch across the Pacific with nothing but tiny islands as stopping points. They packed up their parachutes and had them shipped home because they knew they would be of no use if they ran into trouble over the ocean. Parachuting into the Pacific would simply mean drowning at sea.
On July 2, 1937 they took off from New Guinea headed for Howland Island, a tiny sliver of land just over a mile long and a quarter-mile across – 2500 miles away, in the middle of the ocean.
They never arrived. Their last radio transmissions indicated that they were off course and could not find the island, although they were in the right area.
Le
ss than an hour after her last transmission, the US Navy launched an intensive search and rescue operation. They found no wreckage. No rafts. Nothing, even though the US government spent $4 million, making it the most costly and intensive air and sea search in history at that time.
Some people believe the plane crashed and sank. Some think they managed to find a place to land, but were captured by the Japanese. Some think she was a US spy and deliberately went underground.
Whatever the truth, one thing is certain: Amelia’s story was now the stuff of legend. A hero had flown off into the sunset, and never returned.
Today, Amelia is a feminist icon and an inspiring role model for women trying to break through gender stereotypes. She was independent, smart, courageous, goal oriented, and keenly aware of her potential influence.
She helped create the modern aviation industry, and in doing so showed that women had just as much right in the cockpit as any man.
Today it is not uncommon on a commercial flight to have a female pilot and male flight attendant.
And that’s a possibility created by the courageous Amelia Earhart.
