Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart was the American aviation pioneer who became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and one of the most-celebrated American figures of the 1930s. She was born Amelia Mary Earhart on July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas. She trained as a nurse during World War I, briefly attended Columbia University, and took her first flying lesson in 1921 from pioneering aviator Anita "Neta" Snook in Long Beach, California. She bought her first plane that same year and earned her pilot's license in 1923, becoming the 16th woman in the world to be licensed by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.

In June 1928 she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic — though as a passenger in a tri-motor flown by Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon. She set out to do it solo, and on May 20–21, 1932, she flew alone from Newfoundland to Northern Ireland in 14 hours and 56 minutes, becoming the first woman and the second person ever (after Charles Lindbergh) to fly the Atlantic solo. Her Atlantic crossing made her an instant international celebrity. She received the Distinguished Flying Cross — the first woman ever to receive it.

In 1937 she set out to circumnavigate the globe along the equatorial route, the longest such attempt to that date. With navigator Fred Noonan she had completed about two-thirds of the 29,000-mile journey when their plane disappeared on July 2, 1937, somewhere between Lae, Papua New Guinea, and tiny Howland Island in the central Pacific. Despite extensive searches by the US Navy and Coast Guard, neither the plane nor the bodies were ever recovered, and Earhart's disappearance became one of the unsolved mysteries of 20th-century American history.

Her name Amelia is from the Old Germanic Amal meaning "work" or "industrious." Amelia has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names since the early 2010s and currently sits in the US top 10.