Amelia Earhart: iconic aviator

Even long after her death, Amelia Mary Earhart remains one of the world’s most celebrated aviators and a symbol of power and success.

Amelia was born on July 24, 1897 in Atchison, Kansas. When she was three, Amelia started living with her grandparents, but still spent her summers with her parents. She moved back in with her parents seven years later.

Amelia had a younger sister named Grace, and while they got along, they didn’t live the perfect childhood. Their father, Sam "Edwin" Earhart, was a lawyer, and an alcoholic, which may have led Amelia to become self-reliant and independent.

While riding a ferris wheel at seven years old, Amelia discovered she was fearless of heights. She was an imaginative and inventive girl, once creating a roller coaster out of 2x4s, a packing box and wheels from a roller-skate. Her reading material demonstrated how sophisticated she was for a child – picking up Harper’s Magazine for Young People, and novels by Dickens and Thackeray. Despite this, teachers didn’t take a liking to Amelia because of her independence and disinterest in recitation. To the dismay of her grandmother, Amelia was also deemed a tomboy because of her sense of adventure and risk taking, as well as her enjoyment of riding ponies, climbing trees, sledding and shooting rats with a rifle. Amelia’s tomboy tendencies continued into high school, where she preferred the basketball team over the cheerleading team.

Amelia first became interested in flying while in Toronto visiting her sister Muriel, a nurse. She spoke with pilots who were treated at the soldiers’ hospital and became excited at the thought of flying after watching planes at a nearby military airfield.

In 1920, Amelia experienced her first airplane ride. After her flight, she said, "As soon as we left the ground, I knew I myself had to fly." There was no doubt she was serious. Just days after, she took her first flying lesson.

Six months later, with the help of her mother Amy, and Muriel, Amelia actually bought an airplane. It was a yellow Kinner Airster nicknamed "The Canary." Believe it or not, Amelia wasn’t a naturally gifted pilot, but she worked hard to build her piloting skills.

After her parents divorced, Amelia moved to Boston and worked as a social worker. In 1928, she was chosen to be the first female passenger on a transatlantic flight. That decision was made by her future husband, publisher George Palmer Putnam.

Amelia and George married in 1931. He didn’t just become her husband – but her publicist as well. While organizing Amelia’s flights and public appearances, George even scored his wife an endorsement deal of luggage and sporting wear. He even published two of her books, "The Fun of It" and "Last Flight."

In 1932, Amelia’s legacy continued to soar, as she became the first woman to make a solo transatlantic flight. She even started designing flying clothes, which Vogue recognized with a two-page spread.

Amelia kept piloting her way into the history books. In 1935, she was the first person to fly from Hawaii to the U.S. Mainland, also becoming the first person to fly solo anywhere in the Pacific Ocean. She was also the first person to fly the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans solo.

That same year, she joined the faculty of Purdue University as a female career consultant. With the university’s help, she bought a Lockheed Electra, a turboprop airliner, so she could fulfill her dream to circumnavigate the world in the air.

In June 1937, Amelia made history once again, this time starting her air journey around the world at the equator. But after travelling over 22,000 miles and nearly two-thirds in to her historic flight, tragedy emerged and one of world’s biggest mysteries began to take shape. What happened to Amelia Earhart? On July 2, 1937, Amelia and her navigator Frederick Noonan vanished. They left Lae, New Guinea for the tiny Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean (about the same distance of a transcontinental flight across the U.S.), but were never seen again. Searchers weren’t able to track down Amelia and Frederick, and it’s been assumed they were lost at sea. But for decades, and even now, people around the world don’t buy that theory. Some conspiracy theorists say the Japanese captured them and accused the pair of espionage.

In 1939, George penned Amelia’s biography, "Soaring Wings" in honour of his beloved wife.

In an October 2009 auction, the goggles she wore during her 1932 transatlantic flight sold for $120,000 U.S.

Also that month, an aviation museum in Ohio that believed it was displaying Amelia’s hair sample made an unfortunate discovery, after DNA analysis revealed it to be a piece of thread.

"In a disappointing turn of events," as Cleveland’s International Women’s Air and Space Museum described it in a statement, the lock of "hair" in their possession since 1986 was revealed as thread only after they put it on display this year. Museum officials said they had confidence in the artifact, having been recovered by a maid at the White House after Earhart — a friend of then first lady Eleanor Roosevelt — stayed there shortly before her final flight.

"It was always believed it was her hair," museum office manager Heather Alexander told AFP.