Remembering Amelia Earhart

On May 20 and 21, 1932, American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart flew a Lockheed Vega 5-B from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, to Culmore in Northern Ireland, becoming the first woman (and the second person) to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Less than three years later on January 11 and 12, 1935*, she became the first aviator to fly solo from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California. After a little more than a month, she was in Chicago and presented a lecture on February 15 at Orchestra Hall entitled, “My Pacific Flight.”

“Women fliers have a definite place in the air transport service as pilots, Amelia Earhart, America’s first lady of the air, declared yesterday as she arrived in Chicago, her old home town,” William Westlake reported in the Herald & Examiner. “The arrival of the smiling modishly-attired former Hyde Park High School girl [she graduated in 1916], who has twice flown the Atlantic and made a solo flight from Honolulu to Oakland, was without fanfare. . . . Tonight she speaks again at the South Shore Country Club, tomorrow night she talks at the LaGrange Sunday Evening Club, and then she is off to Kansas City and Omaha.”

In the Chicago Tribune, Wayne Thomis reported that the Orchestra Hall audience, comprised largely of women, heard Earhart speak, “deprecatingly of her flight’s value as an advancement for aviation. . . . Although Miss Earhart spoke appreciatively of a few grim moments when she took off with a heavy load of gasoline downwind from a muddy field on her Pacific flight, it was the lighter side of ‘my pleasant evening in the air’ that she stressed. There was a bit of pride, too, in her reference to the fact that she had flown exactly on her course throughout the 2,038-mile voyage although she made the flight by dead reckoning. Soon after leaving the islands behind, the commercial program broadcast from a Honolulu radio station on which she was tuned was interrupted, she said. ‘I was listening to the music and then the announcer said: “Miss Earhart has taken off on her flight to San Francisco.” And as I sat up there at 8,000 feet with the motor just in front of me, I thought: “How impertinent of that radio man to be telling me.” ’ ”

On May 21, 1937, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan left Oakland, California, traveling east in a twin-engine Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, beginning an around-the-world flight. Departing Miami, Florida, on June 1, they reached Lae, New Guinea, on June 29, having covered 22,000 miles. On July 2, they left Lae for their next refueling stop, Howland Island; however, they were soon reported missing over the Central Pacific Ocean. A large-scale sea and air search was launched, and by July 18, they were declared lost at sea.

“The most recent group to join the search — a team of underwater archaeologists and marine robotics experts with Deep Sea Vision, an ocean exploration company based in Charleston, South Carolina — says it may have found a clue that could bring some closure to Earhart’s story,” according to recent reporting by Taylor Nicioli for CNN. “By using sonar imaging, a tool for mapping the ocean floor that uses sound waves to measure the distance from the seabed to the surface, the group has spotted an anomaly in the Pacific Ocean — more than 16,000 feet (4,877 meters) underwater — that resembles a small aircraft. The team believes that anomaly could be a Lockheed 10-E Electra, the ten-passenger plane that Earhart was piloting when she went missing while attempting to fly around the world. . . . [DSV] hopes to return to the site within the year to get further confirmation that the anomaly is a plane, which would most likely involve the use of an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) with a camera that would allow the object to be investigated more closely. The team would also look into the possibility of bringing their find to the surface.” The mystery continues.

*According to Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon’s 1997 book Amelia: The Centennial Biography of an Aviation Pioneer, Earhart enjoyed listening to the radio while flying, including “the broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera from New York.” The Met’s performance history database indicates the Saturday, January 12, 1935, broadcast as Wagner’s Tannhäuser featuring Lauritz Melchior, Maria Müller, Dorothee Manski, Richard Bonelli, and Ludwig Hofmann. Artur Bodanzky conducted.

This article also appears here.