It was not long after Charles Lindbergh’s famous solo flight from New York to Paris that women had taken to the skies. Mrs. Frederick Guest of London, the American wife of an Englishman, who had served as Secretary of State for Air under Prime Minister Lloyd George, was the first woman to contemplate an Atlantic crossing. She purchased a tri-motored Ford plane from Commander Richard E. Byrd, and had it stored in a hangar at Boston. Her grown children soon realized that she was serious about the undertaking and talked their mother out of such a dangerous venture. She agreed but instead of abandoning the proposed flight which was designed to foster good will between Britain and the United States, she decided the trip should go ahead as planned except that another American girl should be chosen for the honour. A scouting team consisting of George Palmer Putnam, John S. Flipps and David T. Layman was sent out to find the ideal American woman for the venture. Following a lead from a retired Rear Admiral, named Reginald Belknap who said that he knew a young social worker deeply interested in aviation they finally found their woman. At twenty-nine, Amelia Earhart was ready for the Atlantic, but like so many other pioneer aviators she was soon to learn that the Atlantic was not yet quite ready for her. Bad weather for two weeks had prevented them from taking off from Boston Harbour and when they finally made it to Trepassey, Newfoundland, they were delayed a further two weeks awaiting a break in the weather over the ocean. Before leaving Boston Amelia had written a note to her mother to be opened if the plane didn’t make it. It read: “My life has been very happy and I don’t mind contemplating its end in the midst of it”. The break in the weather came on Sunday morning, June 17th, 1928. The orange and gold hydroplane, named Friendship, piloted by William S. Stultz, with Amelia and mechanic Lou Gordon rose from Trepassey Harbour after its third attempt and headed out over the Atlantic. Twenty hours and forty minutes later in the early morning of June 18th they landed at Burry Port, Wales. Shortage of fuel had prevented them from reaching their destination which was Southampton where they arrived the following day. The Friendship was the first hydroplane to fly non-stop across the Atlantic and only nine years after man’s first trans-Atlantic conquest, Amelia Earhart had become the first woman to make the crossing. For a woman, who by her courage and daring, had just had her name indelibly written into the pages of history, Amelia did not appear to be overly excited at the prospect when she climbed out of the hydroplane at Burry Port. Instead she looked disappointed and complained that all she did was lie on her stomach and take pictures while Stultz flew the plane. “I was only baggage on this trip,” she said, “and maybe someday I’ll try it alone”. That day came on May 20, 1932, only five years after man’s first solo trans-Atlantic crossing. The single engine Lockheed Vega monoplane which was to be used for the flight was chartered in the name of a famous Antarctic aviator, Bernt Balchen. The idea was to avoid publicity that would surely arise if the press got hold of such a scoop. With Balchen at the controls and her mechanic, Eddy Gorski aboard, Amelia Earhart Putnam took off from Petersboro, New Jersey at 3:15 p.m. May 19, 1932. At 6:45 p.m. they landed at Saint John, New Brunswick where they spent the night. They landed on the Harbour Grace airstrip at 2:00 p.m. May 20th having departed Saint John, New Brunswick early that morning. Bernt Balchen had taken the controls as far as Harbour Grace because Amelia wanted to save her energy for her long flight over the North Atlantic. When she arrived at Harbour Grace, Amelia went to Archibald’s Hotel to get some rest, while Balchen and Gorski prepared the plane for the historic flight. With a can of tomato juice and a thermos bottle of Rose Archibald’s soup, the brave young airwoman boarded the red and gold monoplane, waved goodbye to Balchen and Gorski and the cheering crowds and at 7:20 p.m. took off and faced into the sunset. Four hours out from Newfoundland, the exhaust manifold broke and for the next ten hours she was constantly threatened by flames shooting from the vent. Then the altimeter broke causing her to fly blind for five hours. If that wasn’t enough, she had to ride out a rain and lightening storm. Fourteen hours and fifty-four minutes after her departure from Harbour Grace she landed in a field at Culmore, Northern Ireland. “My start on Friday from Newfoundland was delayed a little bit to have time to fix up all the customs requirements. They gave me clearance papers just as if I were Captain of a ship and I filled a blank space saying that I was going to Paris. I wasn’t sure where I was going, but that did just as well as any other,” Amelia recounted. “For the first four hours out I had beautiful weather and I would see the sky and ocean. Everything was lovely.” “Then all of a sudden I ran into rain squalls and heavy wind. Then my exhaust manifold burnt out and bright red flames began shooting out the side.” “I was not frightened, but it isn’t any fun to have those flames so near you. If there were an oil or gas leak it might cause trouble. “Then my altimeter went wrong - the first time in ten years of flying. “It was dark and cloudy and raining and there was nothing for me to do but start climbing. I fixed an easy gradient and kept it up for some time. “Then I discovered my tachometer had frozen, so I knew I was high enough. “Ice formation on my wings made me drop lower. “It was only twice after that I caught a glimpse of the ocean. Once I dropped down and saw little white waves under me, but looking down on mountains when man is missing from the picture I had no measure to tell how high the waves were, or how high I was above them - maybe 100 feet maybe 300. When the morning of Saturday came I was flying between two layers of clouds. The one below me was composed of little white woolly ones. After a while they all joined together and formed just a great white blanket like a snowfall stretching in every direction. “When the sun broke through the blanket above me it was so blinding that, even with my smoked glasses, I had to come down and fly in the clouds for a while so I could see again. “It was here that my eye caught the second glimpse of the ocean. I saw waves running before a northwest wind and thinking I was pretty far south, I turned due east. The result was that I hit Ireland in about the middle, whereas if I had gone on I probably would have passed the Southern tip. “There must have been some error in the weather bureau’s calculations, because they thought I would miss the rain altogether. When I got into the squalls I suppose I was to the south and kept correcting to the north. “I had plenty of fuel and could have kept right on to Paris, maybe further, but my motor was straining so after sighting land, which I knew must be Ireland, I decided to come down. “I could see peat bogs and thatched huts beneath me. I headed North along a railway track and after a while flew over Londonderry. Fifteen minutes later I had landed.” World reaction to her achievement was similar to that which Lindbergh had received when he landed in Paris. Among the hundreds of messages she had received from heads of state was one from the British Prime Minister which said: “Mrs. Earhart Putnam had shown great courage, endurance and skill as a pilot and navigator. We are very proud indeed of our distinguished guest”. From the King of Belgium she received the Cross Chevallier of the Order of Leopold, and from France, the Cross Chevelier of the Legion of Honor. While all the fuss over her was taking place in Europe, her fellow countrymen were awaiting her return to the United States where she was to be presented with the Congressional Medal of Honor. Not only was she the first woman to make a solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, but only the third person to make the trip alone. Two pilots before her (Lindbergh and Hinkler) had made the solo flight. For all the fame and glory that she had earned, Amelia was an exceptionally humble person who always avoided publicity. In a trans-Atlantic telephone conversation with her husband, George Palmer Putnam, she asked that any costly civic demonstrations in her honor be waived and the money be diverted to the need of the unemployed women of America. Amelia Earhart was the first woman to have flown in Newfoundland and to this day remains the only woman to have flown the North Atlantic solo, nonstop from west to east. By 1932 Amelia Earhart Putnam had become the most famous woman pilot alive. Lesser mortals would probably have hung up their cap and goggles at that point in time. But not Amelia. Not as long as there were new worlds out there to conquer, other “firsts for women” as she called her flights. Later that same year (1932) she set a non-stop transcontinental speed record for women flying from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey in 19 hours and 5 minutes. In 1935 she became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to the mainland. And later that same year she became the first person ever to fly from Los Angeles to Mexico City to Newark. But it seems that all of these flights were only in preparation for the big one yet to come. For years Earhart had been thinking about making a flight around the world. Actually, she wanted to be the first person to fly around the world at the equator. She may never have had the opportunity to attempt such a feat had she not become a consulting member of Purdue University’s faculty specializing in careers for women and aeronautics. An Amelia Earhart fund was established by the school’s research foundation and on her 38th birthday Amelia was presented with an $80,000 twin engine Lockheed 10 E Electra. The plane was actually a flying lab equipped with modern navigation and flying devices to be used to study the physical effects of long distance flying. The dual control 10 passenger plane, the most advanced civilian aircraft in the world at that time, made possible her dream of attempting the around the world flight. Accompanied by her navigator, Fred Noonan, Earhart set out across the United States on May 30, 1937, ten years after Charles Lindbergh had begun his famous flight from New York to Paris. Having made an earlier attempt to fly around the world east to west, the second attempt was made west to east. They left California, refueled in Tuscon, Arizona and continued on to Miami, Puerto Rico, South America, Africa, the Middle East, India, Thailand, Singapore, Sumatra, Australia until arriving in New Guinea. The next and second last leg of their journey would be a hop halfway across the biggest pond, the greatest bay of them all, the Pacific Ocean. They had planned to make a landing on Howland Island, a spit of land one and a half miles long and a half a mile wide with an elevation of less than 20 feet. It was the most dangerous part of the planned journey. With enough fuel for 24 hours of flying, Earhart estimated that the flight from Lae, New Guinea to Howland, a distance of some 2,556 miles, would take them 18 hours. During the flight Earhart gave periodic reports of her position and the weather conditions to ships in the area. Finally at 8:45 a.m., July 2, 20 hours and 15 minutes after the plane had left New Guinea: “We are on a line of position 157 (degrees) - 337 (degrees). We are running north and south.” This was the last word that was ever heard from Amelia Earhart. Surprised and shocked by the news, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been a friend of Earhart, launched the largest sea search history of the United States Navy. With their ships and 60 planes, the Armed Forces covered 250,000 square miles of open ocean in search of the missing aviators. It was later estimated that the government had spent some $4 million on the search, a search that was in vain, for in the end they turned up nothing. The official version of their fate was that they ran out of gas, crashed in the Pacific probably within 100 miles of Howland and drowned. But two other theories persist. The first is that they were probably captured by the Japanese and kept prisoner until after the war when they were released and are still alive and well and living on the east coast of the U.S. The Second is that they were captured by the Japanese and executed while on some sort of secret spy mission to the Marshall Islands which were then held by the Japanese. This theory was backed up by an eleven-year-old girl who reported seeing an American woman and man on Saipan in 1937. She said she saw them being led away by soldiers, shots were fired and the soldiers returned alone. What happened to Amelia Earhart Putnam? Searchers with the kind of adventurous spirit that would cause them to spend millions on expeditions to find Noah’s Ark or the Titanic have been trying to find the answer to that question for years. Perhaps some day their painstaking search will pay off and we will finally know what happened to the most famous aviatrix the world has ever known. Had she lived, there is little doubt that Amelia Earhart would not have hung up her goggles after a flight around the world; not as long as there was breath in her body and there were new worlds to conquer.