57 Fun Facts About Amelia Earhart

In which US state was Amelia Earhart born in 1897?

Kansas gave her a rough-and-tumble childhood: born in her grandparents' Atchison house, she grew up climbing trees, sledding downhill and hunting rats with a rifle.

Over which ocean did Earhart disappear on 2 July 1937?

The Pacific was the final stretch: she had already flown some 22,000 miles of her round-the-world route, and the 7,000 that remained all lay across it.

During the First World War, Earhart worked as a nurse's aide in a military hospital in which city?

Toronto also gave her the flying bug: at an air show there a stunt pilot dived at her and a friend, she stood her ground, and she later said the little red plane told her something as it swished by.

Who gave Earhart her first flying lesson in January 1921?

Neta Snook taught her in a Curtiss Jenny while Earhart worked at a telephone company and as a photographer to help pay the fees; in 1974 Snook published her memoir as I Taught Amelia to Fly.

What nickname did Earhart give her first aeroplane, a yellow Kinner Airster biplane?

The Canary had to go when the family money ran out: she sold it and bought a yellow Kissel speedster car she called the Yellow Peril, then drove her mother across the continent in it.

What kind of women's record did Earhart set in October 1922, her first?

Altitude: she took her little Kinner biplane up to 14,000 feet on 22 October 1922, an unofficial women's record set months before she even held her international pilot's licence.

In which city was Earhart a social worker at Denison House when the call came to fly the Atlantic?

Boston: she was teaching English to immigrant families at Denison House in April 1928 when a phone call at work asked whether she would like to fly the Atlantic.

On the 1928 flight that made her the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, what was Earhart's role?

Passenger: Wilmer Stultz did the flying, and though she had been promised time at the controls she never got it, calling herself "just baggage, like a sack of potatoes".

What was the name of the Fokker seaplane that carried Earhart across the Atlantic in 1928?

Friendship: its owner Amy Phipps Guest had wanted to make the flight herself, but when her family objected she asked for "the right sort of girl" to go instead.

The 1928 Atlantic flight was bound for Southampton but first came down in an estuary in which country?

Wales: the seaplane set down off Burry Port in Carmarthenshire, made headlines worldwide, and flew on to cheering crowds in Southampton the next day.

What nickname did the press give Earhart because of her resemblance to Charles Lindbergh?

Lady Lindy: the name played on Lindbergh's own nickname, "Lucky Lindy", and newspapers ran with it after her 1928 Atlantic crossing.

What was the title of Earhart's first book, her account of the 1928 Atlantic crossing?

20 Hrs. 40 Min.: the title is simply the time the 1928 crossing took, and the book and lecture tour that followed turned her into a national celebrity.

Which magazine took Earhart on as an editor in 1928, giving her pages to urge women to try flying?

Cosmopolitan: she used her pages there to campaign for commercial air travel and to coax women into aviation, with articles asking why they were afraid to fly.

In the early 1930s Earhart became the first woman to fly which type of aircraft, later taking one coast to coast?

An autogiro: spinning blades on top give it lift while a propeller pulls it along, and her cross-country tour in one was marred by very public crack-ups.

Earhart helped found and was the first elected president of which organisation for women pilots?

The Ninety-Nines: the name counts the 99 licensed women pilots who signed up as charter members after the group's first meeting in November 1929.

Whom did Earhart marry in February 1931?

George Palmer Putnam: the publisher who had helped choose her for the 1928 flight proposed six times before she finally said yes.

In a wedding-day letter, Earhart told her husband-to-be she would not hold him to any medieval code of what?

Faithfulness: she would not be bound by it either, she wrote, and she made him promise to let her go after a year if they found no happiness together.

Harbour Grace, the starting point of Earhart's 1932 solo Atlantic flight, lies in which of these places?

Newfoundland: her 1928 crossing had left the same island from Trepassey, but this time she set off alone, on 20 May 1932, five years to the day after Lindbergh.

Which aircraft did Earhart fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932?

A Lockheed Vega: the red single-engine plane brought her through iced-up wings and an engine spitting flames, and it is now on display in the Smithsonian.

Earhart's 1932 solo flight ended in a pasture near Culmore, in which part of the world?

Northern Ireland: she had been bound for Paris, but ice and engine trouble forced her down in a cow pasture near Londonderry after about 15 hours alone in the air.

Which US military decoration did Congress award Earhart after her 1932 Atlantic solo?

The Distinguished Flying Cross: a military medal handed to a civilian, presented by Vice President Charles Curtis, and the first ever given to a woman.

In January 1935 Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to which mainland city?

Oakland: some 18 hours after leaving Hawaii she landed to a crowd of thousands, having paused over mid-ocean for what she called the most interesting cup of hot chocolate of her life.

In 1935 Amelia Earhart joined which university as a visiting faculty member and aeronautics adviser?

Purdue: she counselled its women students on careers, and the university's research foundation paid for the twin-engine Lockheed in which she set out around the world.

What did Earhart call the twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E she flew on her final journey?

The flying laboratory: the name sold it as a test-bed for new aviation equipment, though the plane was really bought with a round-the-world flight in mind.

Who was Earhart's navigator on the final leg of the 1937 round-the-world attempt?

Fred Noonan: he had been Pan American's lead navigator on its Clipper survey flights, and he flew on alone with her after she dropped her plan to carry two navigators.

From which airfield did Earhart and her navigator take off on 2 July 1937, never to be seen again?

Lae, New Guinea: they had flown some 22,000 miles to get there, and only about 7,000 miles, nearly all of it over open ocean, remained.

Which tiny island was Earhart trying to reach when she vanished in July 1937?

Howland Island: a speck of coral some 2,500 miles from her take-off point; a ship waited there to mark it with a plume of smoke, yet her last radio calls said she could not see it.

Why could the waiting cutter Itasca not guide Earhart in by radio?

She could not hear its calls: the cutter picked up her voice so strongly that its radiomen thought she was close, yet she heard none of its voice replies, and the one Morse signal she caught gave her no bearing.

Which First Lady slipped away from a White House dinner with Earhart to take a night flight?

Eleanor Roosevelt: the two grew close after a White House visit in 1933, bound by a shared love of flying and of women's causes.

Which US president presented Earhart with the National Geographic Society's gold medal after her 1932 solo flight?

Herbert Hoover: four years earlier Calvin Coolidge had received her and the 1928 crew at the White House; now a second president was honouring a crossing she had made entirely alone.

What did a British official report finding on Nikumaroro in 1940 that feeds the theory Earhart died there?

Human bones: a doctor who measured them at the time judged them a stocky man's, but a 2018 re-study of his figures found them more like Earhart than 99 percent of people sampled.

A long-running theory holds that Earhart did not crash at sea but was taken prisoner by which country?

Japan: the story has her coming down in the Marshall Islands and being shipped to Saipan as a prisoner, but nothing has ever confirmed it; the Smithsonian's view is that she simply ran out of fuel and ditched.

How did Irene Bolam respond when a 1970 book claimed she was secretly Amelia Earhart?

She denied it and sued: Bolam filed a lawsuit and a sworn rebuttal, and researchers who later traced her own life story ruled out any chance that she was the lost flyer.

Which actress played Earhart in the 2009 biopic Amelia?

Hilary Swank: Richard Gere played her husband, but critics were cool, faulting a film that ticked off Earhart's feats without exploring the woman herself.

Which women's first did Earhart set in autumn 1928?

Fly solo across North America and back: on the way west she lost her bearings and had to come down in the small town of Hobbs, New Mexico, to the surprise of its residents.

The 1934 Bendix Trophy race banned women pilots but still wanted Earhart's help; what did she refuse to do?

Fly its star guest in: she would not take the actress Mary Pickford to Cleveland to open the races, and two years later Louise Thaden and Blanche Noyes won the Bendix outright.

Earhart was vice president of the Ludington Line, whose hourly flights from New York via Philadelphia ended in which city?

Washington, D.C.: its planes left every hour on the hour, and the line gambled on ticket sales alone, flying without the air mail subsidy other airlines relied on.

Earhart took a cigarette endorsement deal and gave the money to whose polar venture?

Richard Byrd's South Pole trip: she did not smoke, and she handed her $1,500 Lucky Strike fee to the expedition, yet the advert still drew sharp criticism.

In 1919 Earhart began pre-med studies at which New York City university before leaving to rejoin her parents?

Columbia: she lasted a year as a pre-med before going west to her reunited parents in Los Angeles, and within a year of arriving she was taking flying lessons.

In 1935 Earhart made the first solo flight from Los Angeles to which foreign capital?

Mexico City: less than three weeks later she flew on from there nonstop to Newark in just over 14 hours, where the crowd spilled onto the field and policemen had to pull her from the plane.

Which humorist nicknamed the 1929 Women's Air Derby, in which Earhart came third, the 'Powder Puff Derby'?

Will Rogers: his joke stuck, but the race was no powder puff, a transcontinental haul from Santa Monica to Cleveland, the first of its kind for women, won by Louise Thaden.

How did Earhart change her route for the second round-the-world attempt in 1937?

She flew east instead of west: the first try had headed from California toward Hawaii, but the second left Miami on 1 June 1937, saving the longest and hardest over-water legs for the very end.

Retracing Earhart's route in 1967, Ann Pellegreno dropped what over the destination island?

A wreath: she let it fall on the thirtieth anniversary of the disappearance, then flew her restored Lockheed 10, a sister ship of the lost plane, home to finish the round-the-world trip.

Which Star Trek series featured an episode, "The 37's", in which Earhart turns up alive?

Voyager: its crew finds her preserved on a distant planet, one of a group abducted from Earth in 1937, and the ship's captain, a lifelong admirer, greets her as a kindred spirit.

Earhart planned her 1937 world flight to stay close to which line on the globe?

The equator: earlier round-the-world flyers had taken shorter northern routes, so following the globe's waistline made hers the longest way round, with long hops over open water between tiny islands.

What did young Earhart build on the family tool shed in 1904 after a trip to St. Louis?

A roller-coaster ramp: it copied a ride she had seen at the St. Louis World's Fair, and when her wooden-box car tipped over at the roof's edge she came up bruised and delighted, saying it was just like flying.

Unimpressed by the first aeroplane she saw, at the Iowa State Fair, young Earhart asked to go back to what?

The merry-go-round: she later wrote the aeroplane off as "a thing of rusty wire and wood", and it took a stunt-flying display almost a decade later to awaken her passion for flight.

Growing up, Earhart kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about what?

Women succeeding in men's careers: her clippings ranged from law and advertising to mechanical engineering, and she defied expectations herself by taking an auto repair course.

Which New York department store opened the first shop for Earhart's own clothing line?

Macy's: her practical clothes for active women, some cut from parachute silk, went on sale there first, but despite her fame the venture was shut down within the year.

Earhart's husband gave up book publishing in the 1930s for a job in which industry?

Movies: he headed the editorial board at Paramount Pictures, and she visited the set of its flying drama Wings in the Dark, in which Myrna Loy played a daring aviator opposite Cary Grant.

In 2022 Earhart's home state sent a bronze statue of her to stand in which building?

The US Capitol: each state may honour two people with statues there, and in 2022 hers replaced that of a nineteenth-century senator, John James Ingalls.

What ended Earhart's first round-the-world attempt in Hawaii in March 1937?

A crash on takeoff: the Electra swung into a ground loop at Luke Field in Pearl Harbor, its landing gear collapsed, and the plane had to go back to California for repairs.

How much did the 1937 US Navy and Coast Guard search for Earhart cost, then the most in US history?

$4 million: ships and aircraft combed some 250,000 square miles of ocean for more than two weeks, and found nothing.

Which famed ocean explorer led a 2019 expedition around Nikumaroro that found no trace of Earhart's plane?

Robert Ballard: the Titanic's finder was drawn in by an old photo of the island's reef showing a blur that might be landing gear, yet his underwater robots circled the whole island and found nothing.

What did Earhart do to make her new leather flying jacket look properly worn?

Slept in it for three nights: keen to look the part among seasoned pilots, she also cropped her hair short in the style of other women flyers.

Which singer-songwriter's 1976 song 'Amelia' speaks to Earhart 'from one solo pilot to another'?

Joni Mitchell: she wrote the songs of her album Hejira on long drives across America, and this one sets her own restless journey beside the lost flyer's.

Which magazine's 2020 project named a Woman of the Year for every year since 1920, giving Earhart 1935?

Time: its yearly honour was long titled Man of the Year and its covers were almost always men, so editors made new covers for a century of women, picking 1935 for her solo flight from Hawaii.