[2] She was one of the first aviators to promote commercial air travel, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots.

Her legacy is often compared to that of the early career of pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh, as well as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, for their close friendship and lasting influence on women's causes.

In 1937, during an attempt to become the first woman to complete a circumnavigational flight of the globe, flying a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra airplane, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared near Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean.

[9] Amelia was born in the home of her maternal grandfather Alfred Gideon Otis (1827–1912), who was a former judge in Kansas, the president of Atchison Savings Bank, and a leading resident of the town.

[18] In 1904, with the help of her uncle, Amelia Earhart constructed a home-made ramp that was fashioned after a roller coaster she had seen on a trip to St. Louis, Missouri, and secured it to the roof of the family tool shed.

Following Amelia's well-documented first flight, she emerged from the broken wooden box that had served as a sled with a bruised lip, a torn dress and a "sensation of exhilaration", saying: "Oh, Pidge, it's just like flying!

[23] Sisters Amelia and Grace—who from her teenage years went by her middle name Muriel—Earhart remained with their grandparents in Atchison while their parents moved into new, smaller quarters in Des Moines.

At about this time, Earhart's grandmother Amelia Otis died, leaving a substantial estate that placed her daughter's share in a trust, fearing Edwin's drinking would exhaust the funds.

[26] In 1915, after a long search, Edwin Earhart found work as a clerk at the Great Northern Railway in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Amelia entered Central High School as a junior.

[38] While staying in the hospital during the pre-antibiotic era, Earhart had painful minor operations to wash out the affected maxillary sinus[36][37][38] but these procedures were not successful and her headaches worsened.

[56] Following her parents' divorce in 1924, Earhart drove her mother in "Yellow Peril" on a transcontinental trip from California with stops throughout the western United States and northward to Banff, Alberta, Canada.

After recuperation, she returned to Columbia University for several months but was forced to abandon her studies and any further plans for enrolling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), because her mother could no longer afford the tuition fees and associated costs.

When Earhart lived in Medford, she maintained her interest in aviation, becoming a member of the American Aeronautical Society's Boston chapter and eventually being elected its vice president.

On June 17, 1928, the team departed from Trepassey Harbor, Newfoundland, in a Fokker F.VIIb/3m named Friendship and landed at Pwll near Burry Port, South Wales, exactly 20 hours and 40 minutes later.

[66] When Stultz, Gordon, and Earhart returned to the United States on July 6, they were greeted with a ticker-tape parade along the Canyon of Heroes in Manhattan, followed by a reception with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House.

[83][84] In 1930, Earhart became an official of the National Aeronautic Association, and in this role, she promoted the establishment of separate women's records and was instrumental in persuading the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) to accept a similar international standard.

Earhart referred to her marriage as a "partnership" with "dual control"; in a letter to Putnam and hand-delivered to him on the day of the wedding, she wrote: I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil [sic] code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly ...

[106] After a flight lasting 14 hours, 56 minutes, during which she contended with strong northerly winds, icy conditions and mechanical problems, Earhart landed in a pasture at Culmore, north of Derry, Northern Ireland.

Following the fire, the couple decided to move to the west coast, where Putnam took up his new position as head of the editorial board of Paramount Pictures in North Hollywood.

[124] At Earhart's urging, in June 1935, Putnam purchased a small house in Toluca Lake, a San Fernando Valley celebrity enclave community between the Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures studio complexes, where they had earlier rented a temporary residence.

[137] Under the original plans, Noonan would navigate from Hawaii to Howland Island—a difficult portion of the flight—then Manning would continue with Earhart to Australia, and she would proceed on her own for the remainder of the project.

Due to problems with the propeller hubs' variable pitch mechanisms, the aircraft needed servicing and was taken to the United States Navy's Luke Field facility at Pearl Harbor.

The flight never left Luke Field; during the takeoff run, there was an uncontrolled ground-loop, the forward landing gear collapsed, both propellers hit the ground, and the plane skidded on its belly.

[151] At this point, the radio operators on Itasca realized their RDF system could not tune into the aircraft's signal on 3105 kHz; radioman Leo Bellarts later commented he "was sitting there sweating blood because I couldn't do a darn thing about it".

[158] British aviation historian Roy Nesbit interpreted evidence in contemporary accounts and Putnam's correspondence and concluded Earhart's Electra was not fully fueled at Lae.

[167] Beginning approximately one hour after Earhart's last recorded message, Itasca undertook an unsuccessful search north and west of Howland Island based on initial assumptions about transmissions from the aircraft.

[158] In 2024, Deep Sea Vision, a Charleston, South Carolina, company that operates unmanned underwater vehicles, found via sonar what it said could be the remains of Earhart's airplane on the ocean floor.

[183] In 1990, Donald Angwin, a veteran of the Australian Army's World War II New Britain campaign, reported that in 1945 he had seen a wrecked aircraft in the jungle that may have been Earhart's Electra.

[184] In November 2006, National Geographic Channel aired an episode of its series Undiscovered History that supposed Earhart survived the world flight, changed her name, remarried, and became Irene Craigmile Bolam.

Her shyly charismatic appeal, independence, persistence, coolness under pressure, courage and goal-oriented career, along with the circumstances of her disappearance at a comparatively early age, have driven her lasting fame in popular culture.