Amelia Earhart Trivia
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This Amelia Earhart trivia quiz has 57 free questions with answers and follows the aviator from her birth in Atchison, Kansas, through nursing wounded soldiers in Toronto, her first lesson with Neta Snook, the yellow biplane she called the Canary, the 1928 Atlantic crossing on which she felt like "a sack of potatoes", the 1932 solo flight that landed in an Irish pasture, the records in the Vega and the autogiro, the marriage to George Putnam, the Ninety-Nines and Purdue, and finally the Lockheed Electra, Fred Noonan, Howland Island, the cutter Itasca and the theories that have swirled ever since. The easy questions are ones most people know (which ocean she vanished over, which nickname the press gave her). The medium ones cover her aircraft, her records and her firsts. The hard ones ask about the farm hand's question in Culmore, the newspaper she carried to prove her date, the chewing-gum company that lent her an autogiro and the letter she handed her husband on their wedding day. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
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Q 01In which US state was Amelia Earhart born in 1897?
Kansas
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.
Q 02Over which ocean did Earhart disappear on 2 July 1937?
The Pacific
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.
Q 03During the First World War, Earhart worked as a nurse's aide in a military hospital in which city?
Toronto
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.
Q 04Who gave Earhart her first flying lesson in January 1921?
Neta Snook
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.
Q 05What nickname did Earhart give her first aeroplane, a yellow Kinner Airster biplane?
The Canary
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.
Q 06What kind of women's record did Earhart set in October 1922, her first?
Altitude
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.
Q 07In which city was Earhart a social worker at Denison House when the call came to fly the Atlantic?
Boston
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.
Q 08On the 1928 flight that made her the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, what was Earhart's role?
Passenger
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".
Q 09What was the name of the Fokker seaplane that carried Earhart across the Atlantic in 1928?
Friendship
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.
Q 10The 1928 Atlantic flight was bound for Southampton but first came down in an estuary in which country?
Wales
Wales: the seaplane set down off Burry Port in Carmarthenshire, made headlines worldwide, and flew on to cheering crowds in Southampton the next day.
Q 11What nickname did the press give Earhart because of her resemblance to Charles Lindbergh?
Lady Lindy
Lady Lindy: the name played on Lindbergh's own nickname, "Lucky Lindy", and newspapers ran with it after her 1928 Atlantic crossing.
Q 12What was the title of Earhart's first book, her account of the 1928 Atlantic crossing?
20 Hrs. 40 Min.
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.
Q 13Which magazine took Earhart on as an editor in 1928, giving her pages to urge women to try flying?
Cosmopolitan
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.
Q 21Which US military decoration did Congress award Earhart after her 1932 Atlantic solo?
The Distinguished Flying Cross
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.
Q 22In January 1935 Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to which mainland city?
Oakland
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.
Q 23In 1935 Amelia Earhart joined which university as a visiting faculty member and aeronautics adviser?
Purdue
Q 14In the early 1930s Earhart became the first woman to fly which type of aircraft, later taking one coast to coast?
An autogiro
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.
Q 15Earhart helped found and was the first elected president of which organisation for women pilots?
The Ninety-Nines
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.
Q 16Whom did Earhart marry in February 1931?
George Palmer Putnam
George Palmer Putnam: the publisher who had helped choose her for the 1928 flight proposed six times before she finally said yes.
Q 17In a wedding-day letter, Earhart told her husband-to-be she would not hold him to any medieval code of what?
Faithfulness
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.
Q 18Harbour Grace, the starting point of Earhart's 1932 solo Atlantic flight, lies in which of these places?
Newfoundland
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.
Q 19Which aircraft did Earhart fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932?
A Lockheed Vega
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.
Q 20Earhart's 1932 solo flight ended in a pasture near Culmore, in which part of the world?
Northern Ireland
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.
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.
Q 24What did Earhart call the twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E she flew on her final journey?
The flying laboratory
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.
Q 25Who was Earhart's navigator on the final leg of the 1937 round-the-world attempt?
Fred Noonan
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.
Q 26From which airfield did Earhart and her navigator take off on 2 July 1937, never to be seen again?
Lae, New Guinea
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.
Q 27Which tiny island was Earhart trying to reach when she vanished in July 1937?
Howland Island
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.
Q 28Why could the waiting cutter Itasca not guide Earhart in by radio?
She could not hear its calls
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.
Q 29Which First Lady slipped away from a White House dinner with Earhart to take a night flight?
Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
Q 30Which US president presented Earhart with the National Geographic Society's gold medal after her 1932 solo flight?
Herbert Hoover
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.