Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas on July 24, 1897. She saw her first plane at a state fair when she was 10 years old. On December 28, 1920, pilot Frank Hawks gave Amelia her first ride in an airplane. Amelia took her first flying lesson on January 3, 1921. In 1923, Amelia became the sixteenth woman to receive a pilot’s license.
On May 20, 1937, Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Oakland, California on the first leg of their historic round-the-world flight. They disappeared 43 days later while trying to locate tiny Howland Island in the remote Pacific. Howland Island, with its rudimentary airstrip, was Earhart's next stop. In one of Amelia Earhart's last transmissions, the U.S. Navy Radio in Honolulu heard a garbled Morse code: “281 north Howland - call KHAQQ - beyond north ... won't hold with us much longer ... above water ... shut off.”
How’s this for poetic justice? In 2014, another woman named Amelia Earhart—yes, that’s her real name—became the youngest woman to fly around the world in a single-engine plane. She felt that considering her name and her similar passion for flying, she almost had a duty to do what her namesake couldn’t. “By recreating and symbolically completing her flight around the world, I hope to develop an even deeper connection to my namesake,” this Amelia Earhart claimed. We think her predecessor would be proud for sure.