Fly away with a record-breaker

National Amelia Earhart Day is on July 24, named for the famous female aviator born on 1897.

Earhart was an aviator who set many records for women. History.com says, “She defied traditional gender roles from a young age. Earhart played basketball, took an auto repair course, and briefly attended college.” She served as a Nurse in World War I, after she took one semester in pre-med.

She took her first plane ride in 1920 and loved it. One year later she started flying lessons, and bought a plane. National Women’s History Museum says, “She flew it, in 1922, when she set the women’s altitude record of 14,000 feet.”

In 1928 she became the First woman to fly across the Atlantic. The Official Licensing Website of Amelia Earhart says that, in 1935, she became the first person to fly solo nonstop from Mexico City to Newark and the first person to fly solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City. Those are just a few of her records, in her lifetime she also broke her own records!

Amelia Earhart died in a plane crash after running out of fuel. History.com says, “On the morning of July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Lae, New Guinea, on one of the last legs in their historic attempt to circumnavigate the globe.” They crashed into the Pacific Ocean and presumably drowned; they were never found nor was the plane. Earhart’s disappearance is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century!