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The Beginnings
Amelia Earhart is born in Atchison, Kansas, to parents Amy Otis and Edwin Stanton Earhart. Her sister, Muriel, is born two years later.
Amelia lives primarily with her maternal grandparents in Atchison during the school year and spends summers with her parents in Kansas City. Despite her grandmother's disapproval, Amelia spends her free time roaming the outdoors — riding imaginary horses, climbing trees, sledding, and hunting. -
Heart to Help
After visiting her sister in 1917 at a college preparatory school in Toronto, Canada, Amelia decided to train as a nurses aid in Toronto and served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse at a military hospital until November 1918.
"There for the first time I realized what the World War meant. Instead of new uniforms and brass bands, I saw only the result of four years' desperate struggle; men without arms and legs, men who were paralyzed and men who were blind..." -
Hooked on Flying
Amelia attends an air show on Long Beach with her father. With pilot Frank Hawk, she takes her first ride in an airplane for $10.
“By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly,” she later recalled.
Amelia has her first flying lesson with pilot Neta Snook. -
Amelia Get's Hitched
Amelia Earhart marries George Palmer Putnam. After 6 proposals, she finally said yes! -
Setting first record
Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She departs from Newfoundland and lands in a pasture in Northern Ireland.
She won the Gold Medal of the National Geographic Society from President Hoover for her flight.
Now, there is a small museum at the site of her landing in Ireland, the Amelia Earhart Center. -
2 Times a Charm
Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly solo across the North American continent and back.
She visits the White House. From this visit she develops a friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt .
Amelia then flies across North America for the second time, breaking her own record with a faster flight time. -
Thinking the Globe
Purdue University finances a new plane for Amelia, a Lockhead Electra 10E which she calls the “Flying Laboratory,” though the plane was purchase less for scientific research and more for Amelia's new dream: a “prize - one flight which I most wanted to attempt - a circumnavigation of the globe as near its waistline as could be.”
Amelia and her husband George Putnam plan for her world flight, raising money and consulting with advisers, mechanics, and navigators. -
Gone
Leaving Miami, Florida and traveling from west to east, Fred Noonan is her only crew member. They complete nearly 22,000 miles of the flight, stopping in South America, Africa, India, and Lae, New Guinea.
Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan depart from Lae - destination is Howland Island, in the Pacific. Amelia and Noonan cannot find the island, and they lose radio contact with the Coast Guard, who can hear that they are lost but cannot return communication. They disappear over the Pacific Ocean.
