Jan 11, 1935: Earhart flies from Hawaii to California
72 years ago today, on the first flight of its kind, American aviator Amelia Earhart departed Wheeler Field in Honolulu, Hawaii, on a solo flight to North America.
Hawaiian commercial interests offered a $10,000 award to whoever accomplished the flight first. The next day, after traveling 2,400 miles in 18 hours, she safely landed at Oakland Airport in Oakland, California to great fanfare.
Amelia Earhart was born on July 24, 1898 in Atchison, Kansas. Her father was a lawyer and her mother the daughter of a wealthy judge. Her father, Edwin, was frustrated because he was never able to provide his wife with the kind of lifestyle she had become accustomed to growing up in the judge's house. They moved around a lot as her dad sought high-paying law gigs.
Earhart birthplace and museum in Atchison, KS
She attended Columbia University in NYC and did well in a pre-med program. Later, she decided to quit and moved to California with her family. In 1919 she attended an airshow and was bitten by the flying bug.
She took flying lessons from various aviators (including Neta Snook, the first female licensed pilot in the US) and soloed in 1921. She stuck with it of course and in 1922, with the help of her father, she purchased a sport biplane built by William Kenner. That same year she used her plane to set her first aviation record which was the maximum-altitude-obtained-by-a-woman-pilot: 14,000 feet.
Earhart (left) and her flying instructor, Neta Snook
While things were going well for Earhart in the air, her family was having problems back on the ground. Her parents divorced in 1924. Amelia decided to put her aviation on hold, sold her plane and bought a car. She used the car to drive her mother across country to settle in Medfort, Massachusetts where Amelia's sister, Muriel lived.
Amelia returned to her studies at Columbia University, but withdrew before the semester was over. Earhart later told friends, "That semester convinced me that I didn't have the qualities to be an M.D. For one, I lacked the patience. I wanted to be doing something, not preparing for it."
A classy looking lady, Earhart lived in a time when women were stretching the boundaries of "acceptable" behavior by becoming involved in pursuits which had been exclusively the province of men.
In 1928, as a member of a three-member crew, she had become the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an aircraft. Although her only function during the crossing was to keep the plane's log, the event won her national fame, and Americans were enamored with the modest and daring young pilot from Kansas. For her solo transatlantic crossing in 1932, she was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross by Congress.
On May 21, 1932, exactly five years after American aviator Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Earhart became the first woman to repeat the feat when she landed her plane in Londonderry, Ireland.
Earhart and the plane she tried to fly around the world
Two years after her historic Hawaii to California flight (which began on this day in 1935,) she attempted with co-pilot Frederick J. Noonan to fly around the world in a Lockheed "Electra," but her plane was lost on July 2, 1937.
Lockheed Electra...designed as a twin engine airliner
They were lost somewhere between New Guinea and Howland Island in the South Pacific. Radio operators picked up a signal that she was low on fuel--the last trace the world would ever know of Amelia Earhart.
Area in which Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937.
Theories abound as to Earhart's fate. Off and on, people have been searching for clues about her disappearance. One theory is that she was captured by Imperial Japanese forces who were worried she may have learned too much about their designs for conquest in the Pacific. She may have been eaten by New Guinea cannibals. She might have simply ran out of fuel and ditched in the sea. We'll probably never know.
