In an age when women were not only earthbound, but also largely homebound, a young woman not only took to the skies but soared high. Amelia Earhart started challenging traditional roles and stereotypes from an early age. Born in Kansas on 24 July 1897, as a young girl she played basketball, took an auto repair course, and briefly attended college. During World War I she served as a Red Cross nurse’s aide in Canada. She spent a lot of her time at a local airfield in Toronto watching pilots in the Royal Training Force train. After the war she returned to America and enrolled in a pre-med course at Columbia University.

In December 1920 she was in California when she took her first airplane ride with the famed World War I pilot Frank Hawks. She was hooked. She knew that the sky was where she belonged, not as a passenger, but as a pilot. “As soon as I left the ground, I knew I myself had to fly”.

A month later she started flying lessons with a female flight instructor Neta Snook. She worked as a photographer and filing clerk at the Los Angeles Telephone company, to pay for the lessons. Later that year she purchased her first airplane. She named the second-hand yellow plane The Canary. She passed her flight test in December 1921, and obtained a National Aeronautics Association license. Two days later, she participated in her first flight exhibition at the Sierra Airdrome in Pasadena, California. Her days of breaking records were on the horizon. And June was always a significant month in her flying career.

However, her first brush with fame as a “first” achiever was not as a pilot but as a passenger. On June 18 1928, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger in a flight piloted by Wilmer Stultz and Lou Gordon from Newfoundland to Wales. She had, in fact, been promised that she would get a chance to fly the plane over the Atlantic, but the men flew the whole way. Earhart did fly the plane on the final hop from Wales to England. 

In 1929, she helped organize the All-Women’s Air Derby—the first transcontinental air race for women. Women pilots proved that they could fly in difficult and competitive conditions. After the race many of the women decided to form an organization to support women pilots.  Earhart helped to form the Ninety-Nines, an international organization for the advancement of female pilots. She became the first president of the organization of licensed pilots, which still exists today and represents women flyers from 44 countries.

Amelia Earhart was always guided by her strong belief that “Women can qualify in the air as in any other sport. Their influence and approval are vital to the success of commercial aviation. Women and girls write to me by the thousands to learn the truth about aviation and what women’s chances are. There is nothing in a woman’s make up which would make her inferior to a man as an air pilot. The only barrier to her swift success is her lack of opportunity to receive proper training.”

Her solo feats followed. In May 1932 Amelia took off from Newfoundland. The flight was fraught with danger; the sides of the engine spewed flames, while the ice formation on the wings of the plane necessitated that she fly at a lower altitude, almost skimming the waves of the Atlantic. Undeterred and determined, fifteen hours later Amelia landed in Norther Ireland. She became the first woman (and second person after Charles Lindbergh) to fly non-stop and solo across the Atlantic.

 Amelia Earhart went on to set a number of records as a solo woman flier and became internationally renowned. Even as she took wings, literally, Amelia was a down-to-earth supporter of similar rights for all women. She lectured across the country on aviation and women’s causes. She was a visiting professor at Purdue University where she lectured on aeronautics. She wrote several books about her flights. She was also politically active; she lobbied American Congress for aviation legislation, birth control rights and support for women in business and politics. She even designed a line of functional women’s clothing and a line of light-weight luggage. All by the age of forty years.

But then her story took a mysterious turn. On 1 June 1937 Amelia, accompanied by navigator Fred Noonan boarded a twin-engine Lockheed 10E Electra at Oakland, California to embark on a flight that was Amelia’s second attempt to become the first pilot ever to circumnavigate the globe. The two flew to Miami, then down to South America, across the Atlantic to Africa, then east to India and Southeast Asia. On June 29 the pair reached New Guinea. They had successfully flown 22,000 miles. They had 7,000 miles to go before completing the circuit and returning to Oakland with a world first record. On July 2 the two took off from New Guinea, heading for their next refueling stop, a tiny island called Howland in the Pacific Ocean. But before they reached their destination they lost radio contact and never landed on the island. The plane and its crew literally disappeared into thin air.

There were no clues, no signs of a crash, no signals and no sightings of the plane, intact or its wreckage. The very next day, the US Government initiated its search for the missing airplane. It ended up being the largest ever search for a lost aircraft. It yielded no results. On July 19, 1937, Earhart and Noonan were declared lost at sea.

Amelia Earhart and her plane vanished without a trace, and till date the mystery of the disappearance has not been solved. Many theories from the most obvious one of crash in the sea, to the more bizarre, including conspiracy theories, have been floated over the years.

Amelia Earhart remains an inspiration and a mystery. She raised the bar for women not only in aviation but as equal partners to men in all spheres of life. She challenged women to excel in themselves, not in comparison to others.

“Please know that I am aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, then failure must be a challenge to others.”

–Mamata