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The current series is The First Woman and July’s bonus episode for supporters is out. It’s on Brownie Wise, first woman to grace the cover of Business Week. It’s available on Patreon and on Substack. If you’re not a regular supporter, you can still purchase it on Patreon, and all proceeds help keep this show up and running.

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew from New York City to Paris and became an international celebrity. He won $25,000 in prize money. He earned enormously more from publicity afterwards. More to the point: he survived. Everyone in aviation was eager to do the same (Butler, 143).

But it was hazardous. Within one year, fifty-five other people attempted to fly the Atlantic: fourteen of them died, thirty-three lived with failure, and eight succeeded (Butler, 144).

All of the eight were men. Which meant that being the first woman to cross the Atlantic in the air was still a prize within reach.

The wealthy Amy Phipps Guest hoped to catch that prize. She was not a pilot. She planned to fly as a passenger, so she found herself a plane, a pilot, and a mechanic before her family revolted. A combined front of parents, siblings, and children said they preferred her to be alive, not dead, and they were not okay with this.

So Amy Guest settled for merely funding the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. She told her agent to find an American woman. “Someone nice who will do us proud,” by which she meant educated, well-spoken, with good manners, and if possible, a flier. My sources do not say why the woman needed to be a flier, but I am guessing it was to make sure that said woman knew just how risky this was.

The search for such a woman caught the eye of publisher George Putnam. He instantly grasped the financial possibilities here, if only he could finagle his way into the deal. He asked around and someone suggested Amelia Earhart.

Amelia Earhart, as Passenger over the Atlantic

In early 1928, Amelia Earhart was 30 years old, but she didn’t necessarily admit to that. Officially, she was a social worker. But she had taken flying lessons in California and even temporarily owned her own plane.

But this wasn’t her career. It was a hobby until George Putnam asked if she’d like to be the first woman to fly over the Atlantic. Not as pilot. Amy Guest had already hired Wilmer Stultz, a pilot with far more experience than Amelia Earhart. Amelia’s role was to be on board and female. That was all.

Assuming they survived at all, Wilmer Stultz would get $20,000 and the mechanic would get $10,000. Amelia would get nothing. In fact, she had to sign that no one was liable in case of her gruesome death or dismemberment. Any lecturing or writing she did afterwards was all well and good, but money earned would not be hers (Butler, 158; Shapiro, 87).

In other words, they proposed to give Amelia Earhart absolutely nothing but the privilege of risking her life. She said yes.

She did not tell her family. That was Amy Guest’s mistake. But Amelia did write letters to be delivered of her death:

To her mother she wrote, “Even though I have lost, the adventure was worth while… My life has really been very happy, and I didn’t mind contemplating its end in the midst of it.”

To her father she wrote: “Hooray for the last grand adventure! I wish I had won, but it was worthwhile, anyway.”

To her sister she was a little more open: “I have tried to play for a large stake, and if I succeed all will be well. If I don’t, I shall be happy to pop off in the midst of such an adventure… I haven’t told you about the affair as I didn’t want to worry mother and she would suspect if I told you…. I couldn’t stand the added strain of telling mother and you personally” (Butler, 170-171; Shapiro, 99-100).

The first stage of their journey took them to Halifax and then Newfoundland, where weather trapped them for a while. The weather was uncooperative and the bills were mounting, Amelia didn’t even have a change of clothes with her because the weight limits were intense, and then they had news that another woman was about to take her own flight, so Amelia might be doing all this to be only second woman across the Atlantic, and they’d already seen that the media didn’t much care about anyone who was second (Shapiro, 111).

To Amelia’s intense displeasure, the men decided to handle their nerves by getting drunk, so they would likely be hung over when she put her life in their hands.

On June 17, 1928, it was now or never. They took to the air. Amelia had hoped for at least a few minutes at the plane controls, but Stultz wouldn’t let her. To her frustration, she also realized he was right (Shapiro, 116). She knew how to fly, but this was on a whole different level.

I have never been anything other than a passenger on a flight, but I’ve always imagined that those complicated instrument panels in the cockpit are giving pilots real-time information about the flight at any given second. In the 1930s, it was not like that. Radio communication was great, but only until you flew out of range. Visuals were limited to what you could see in front of you, which in this case meant an endless expanse of blue, except when you could see nothing at all but the inside of a cloud. You had no way of knowing how fast you were traveling. The best you could do was measure how fast the air was whipping by, but some of that was windspeed, not your speed, and you couldn’t distinguish between the two. For navigation you had exactly what sailors had used for centuries: the sun, the stars, a sextant, and imperfect charts.

If you miscalculated your position, there was a good chance you’d run out of fuel and plunge to a watery death. You couldn’t carry much extra fuel because the weight limits were intense. You had to get this right. Or you were dead. And that’s even if the weather is good. On this trip, they hit storms.

Amelia simply did not have enough flying experience to handle these conditions, so she touched no controls. She traveled as another piece of baggage.

Or perhaps a little bit more than baggage after all. She couldn’t fly the plane, but she could throw Stultz’s whiskey out the window. And she did (Shapiro, 112).

After 20 hours and 40 minutes, they landed on a beach. They had to ask the locals what country they were in. But it was thrilling to find out they were in Wales. They had done it! A woman had flown across the Atlantic!

First Woman to Fly the Atlantic! A Media Sensation!

The press went wild. Local reporters were conducting interviews within the hour. The crew was allowed six hours of sleep before they had to fly to more populated parts of the UK, where Amelia met Amy Guest for the first time. Amy also provided Amelia with a wardrobe because she surely needed a change by now. Partly on general principle, and partly because Amy Guest and George Putnam had plans. Big plans.

Amelia dined at the American Embassy. She had tea with the Prime Minister. She watched tennis at Wimbledon and races at Ascot. She visited the House of Commons as a guest of Lady Nancy Astor (see episode 16.16) (Butler, 202).

Everywhere she went she was surrounded by admirers gushing about “her” achievement.

Amelia found this a little grating. What had she achieved after all? She had proved her bravery, but not any skill. At one point she said, “It makes me a little resentful that the mere fact that I am a woman apparently overshadows the tremendous feat of flying Bill Stultz has just accomplished” (Butler, 201).

But no one wanted to talk about Bill Stultz. He wasn’t even the second man to do this. He was the eleventh. Who cared about that? Amelia’s accomplishment was less, but she was the first to do it. Plus, she was young, pretty, and brave.

After a boat trip back to New York, Amelia assumed she would return to her social work, but George Putnam had other ideas. He had struck gold with Amelia, and he saw no reason to stop now.

The next step was a bestselling book called 20 Hours and 40 Minutes, ostensibly written by Amelia, but actually ghostwritten as books by celebrities usually are. Then there was a job as aviation editor for Cosmopolitan magazine, also with ghostwritten articles (Shapiro, 162). George lined her up with speaking engagements here, there, and everywhere. As agent he got a 10% cut of everything, which was one of his motivations. His other motivation was that he was openly smitten with her. The fact that he was married seemed irrelevant to him.

He was far more bothered when he found out that Amelia Earhart was engaged. But it all worked out for him. Amelia had been engaged for years, but she showed a curious reluctance to set a date. With new horizons opening up before her, the longstanding engagement was soon over.

George’s enthusiasm for Amelia also led him to flatly lie about her accomplishments to keep the news cycle going. Her pilot’s license turned out to be only a certificate, which was a grade down from the license, but the public didn’t need to know that, right? George told everyone she had done x number of flying hours, but the number he filled in for x rarely had any relationship to reality. Occasionally, he staged some well-publicized stunt flying. The public was led to believe she was controlling the plane, but sometimes she was not (Shapiro, 180).

In truth, she was not the greatest living pilot, or even the greatest female pilot. Plenty of other, more experienced women were gritting their teeth in frustration because Amelia’s real edge was not her flying ability. It was her publicist.

First Woman to Pilot Over the Atlantic! Another Media Sensation!

Amelia knew this perfectly well, and because she was fundamentally more honest than George, she was determined to do something about it. She decided to be the first woman to pilot across the Atlantic. This meant a lot of expensive training, and she barely had time for training, what with all the banquets and speaking engagements.

She also became president of the Ninety-Nine, a women’s organization of aviators. Amelia was always a feminist, despite the fact that George told her to tone it down for the press (Shapiro, 149).

No one can deny that at this point in history, men had achieved far more than women in aviation. Amelia was also clear-eyed and outspoken about why. It wasn’t natural aptitude. It was military service: men learned at taxpayer expense. They were even paid to learn. This was true of both Charles Lindbergh and Wilmer Stultz. Women were barred from the military, so they had to fund it all themselves (Shapiro, 215). No wonder the men were better and more experienced!

Amelia was determined to close that gap, and there was no denying that George Putnam was the one drumming up sponsors to pay for it. That is why my sources tie themselves into knots trying to explain her motives for marrying him in 1931 after his divorce.

Perhaps it was a business arrangement, perhaps they really loved each other, perhaps he manipulated her into it, and perhaps she was the one really in control. All of these narratives have been argued from the evidence. Perhaps even Amelia couldn’t sort out all her motives. It was complicated.

The marriage was unconventional. She continued to go by Miss Earhart. She did not wear a wedding ring. She kept her finances separate, and George still took an agent’s fee from her earnings. She did not promise to obey. She didn’t even promise monogamy. Having tied the knot, they both went right back to work (Shapiro, 233; Backus, 104-105).

First Woman to Pilot Across the Atlantic! Another Media Sensation!

The date chosen for Amelia’s trans-Atlantic flight as pilot was May 20, 1932. That date was significant: it was the five-year anniversary of Lindbergh’s flight.

During training, Amelia crashed several times. George did his absolute best to keep that out of the news. He also hired a team of ghostwriters to start on Amelia’s next book even before the flight (Shapiro, 252)

When the day arrived at last, Amelia took off from Newfoundland at sunset, destination Paris, just like Lindbergh. For four hours it was lovely. Then the storm began.

Her exhaust manifold burned out (Earhart, The Fun of It, 217). She had ice on her wings. Her altimeter broke. She had little idea of where she was, and she later said she gave herself one chance in ten of surviving (Shapiro, 254-255).

When she saw land, she landed. It turned out to be a field in Ireland. It wasn’t Paris, but it counted. She had crossed the Atlantic, and she had done it in record time. This made her the first woman to pilot it and the only person who had ever flown across it twice.

For Amelia it was the proof that she wasn’t a fraud. She later said, “I wanted to prove to myself that I deserved some of the praise I received…. I had the reputation, but I wanted to truly earn it” (Shapiro, 250).

The media circus began all over again, and that was all to the good. It was the only way to keep her career going. And by now it was George’s career too. So in 1932, Amelia became the first woman to fly nonstop across the United States (Shapiro, 272). In 1934, she was the first person to fly from Hawaii to California. In 1935, she flew from California to Mexico City. (Or rather south of Mexico City by accident, where startled vaqueros recognized her just fine. What other woman could just drop from the sky like that?) She was then the first person to fly from Mexico City to New York (Shapiro, 298-300).

These were incredible accomplishments, but by some measures, Amelia was still not the best aviator out there. When she participated in competitions, she usually didn’t win. There were also some gaps in her knowledge, and those were going to catch up with her.

Around the World, the First Attempt

At some point in the early 1930s, Amelia and George began to consider an around-the-world flight. This had already been done, but Amelia planned to do it bigger and better. The very few men who had tried had always hugged the coasts and taken a northern route. Amelia wanted to do it more or less at the equator. That means it’s longer and it covers vast expanses of open ocean (Shapiro, 329).

She needed a newer and better plane for this, so George sweet-talked Purdue University into funding it as aeronautical research. He had contacts there already because Amelia was now on their staff, lecturing on careers for women. She was criticized there for wearing pants, but they liked her star power.

Further funds were to come from commemorative stamps that Amelia would carry with her around the world. Then they would be sold to collectors afterwards. (George wanted to save on the weight by keeping the stamps at home and lying about where they had been, but he faced a revolt at that suggestion.) And of course, there would be a book and more speaking engagements, etc.

Amelia planned to fly westward, with Harry Manning and Fred Noonan as navigators and Paul Mantz as technical advisor. This was not a harmonious group. They had problems from the beginning about who was qualified and who was not. On March 17, 1937, they took off from Oakland, California (Shapiro, 331).

They got to Hawaii, but the plane itself needed servicing, and when they finally took off again, the plane went into an uncontrolled ground loop. Amelia’s own account leaves the cause of this uncertain (Earhart, Last Flight, 71). Other sources suggest that it might have been Amelia’s fault. It’s hard to tell when you know that George Putnam would have falsified the reports if it was her fault. However, there was no dispute about the outcome: No one was flying that plane across the Pacific any time soon.

They went back to California by ship, and Harry Manning quit. Paul Mantz was never planning to go beyond Hawaii anyway. The reduction in crew was discouraging on multiple fronts, but the one that would end up mattering the most was that Manning was qualified in Morse code. Amelia was not. Neither was Fred Noonan.

Around the World, a Second Attempt

By the time Amelia and George had regrouped after the disaster, the plan had changed significantly. Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were going to circumnavigate the globe, but they’d fly it eastward, not westward.

There is much dispute about exactly why the change in direction and whose idea that was.

Also, they lightened the plane by leaving a lot of equipment behind. Why burden yourself with navigational, safety, and communication equipment that neither Amelia nor Fred was qualified to use?

They successfully flew from Oakland to Miami. Then to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Then Venezuela and several locations in Brazil. Then Amelia’s third flight across the Atlantic to Senegal. Then several flights to hop across Africa. Then over to Karachi, Pakistan, and down to Calcutta, India.

At each stop they refueled, resupplied, slept, got cables from George, and sent updates to the press. Occasionally, Fred Noonan got drunk, and Amelia was annoyed (Shapiro, 363).

From Calcutta they flew to Burma, Bangkok, Singapore, and what is now Indonesia. It was there that Amelia got dysentery. She was flagging from this grueling schedule, but still they pressed on.

By the end of June, they had seen Timor and Australia and New Guinea. At this point, they had covered 22,000 miles, but the problem with flying east is that they were ill and exhausted before they even got to the most dangerous part: 7,000 miles of Pacific Ocean.

No plane of this time period could carry enough fuel to fly from New Guinea to Hawaii. So they had to refuel somewhere, and the best of the limited options was Howland Island, which is about one square mile and uninhabited. The US Coast Guard had obligingly agreed to build an air strip there, and a little place to rest, and a fuel cache.

The problem was going to be finding Howland. It was way beyond the range of radio equipment from New Guinea, so Amelia was going to depend on the navigational skill of Fred Noonan to get them close enough to be in range of the radio equipment on a US Coast Guard ship called the Itasca. Then the Itasca would guide them in until Amelia could see an island half the size of Central Park surrounded by the world’s largest ocean.

Across the Pacific

On July 2, 1937, Amelia took off from New Guinea with as much fuel as her plane could hold. It was barely enough to get them to Howland, as long as nothing went wrong.

Unfortunately, things went very, very wrong. There is a wealth of detail, some of it contradictory, about exactly what happened. There’s no doubt that Amelia got very close to Howland. The Itasca recorded clear strong signals from her with her estimated position. But the Itasca crew were utterly baffled by her communications. She urgently requested radio bearings but sometimes turned her receiver off before they had a chance to answer. There was much confusion about what frequency they were sending at. She did not seem to hear their responses. At one point she tried whistling into the radio, hoping that would help them locate her. They wondered why she didn’t use Morse code. She didn’t seem to know how to use the equipment she had, and it would later come out that much of the equipment they had brought was substandard and broken.

The Itasca released smoke bombs, in the hopes that she would see them and come in visually, but the wind was not cooperative. The smoke didn’t go up much. Eventually, all incoming communications went silent and gradually they realized that Amelia Earhart could not possibly still be flying. Her fuel could not have held out so long.

The Itasca immediately swung into full-fledged rescue operations. But where do you look in a vast blue ocean? It is true that the plane could have floated for a little while, maybe even up to eight days. It was very possible to survive a sea landing. As long as the plane didn’t break up on entry. And as long as the sharks didn’t take an interest (Butler, 412).

All ships in the area helped in the search, including the Japanese ships. But they never laid eyes on Amelia Earhart’s plane.

Recriminations and Far-Fetched Theories

As the news filtered back to the United States in bits and pieces, the recriminations began. Did George Putnam push Amelia into this dangerous stunt for the money? How could Amelia have been so reckless and foolhardy as to attempt this flight without learning Morse code? Without adequate radio equipment and adequate training on how to use it? Why did she leave behind the books where the Coast Guard wrote down what radio frequencies they were prepared to use? Or perhaps it was Fred Noonan’s fault? Maybe he had miscalculated their position, and they were much farther away than they thought. It would later come out that his charts did indeed have Howland Island mispositioned by a few miles (Shapiro, 376). But that fact was known to experts before they left the United States! Why hadn’t Noonan used corrected charts?

Fast on the heels of the recriminations came the conspiracy theories and the hoaxes. Perhaps Amelia and Fred had made it to an island and were surviving on coconuts while they awaited rescue. Or perhaps they were found by the Japanese and executed. Or perhaps found by the Japanese and imprisoned. (The US was not yet at war with Japan, but it was imminent enough that some people find this plausible.) Or perhaps the US government was covering something up? After all, why was the Coast Guard so eager to help a private citizen pull off a stunt like this anyway? Maybe Amelia was a spy, and the US government had quietly made her disappear for nefarious reasons of their own. Or maybe they had negotiated a deal with the Japanese and retrieved her from prison on a witness protection program under a new identity.

These theories continue to get serious hearings even today (Jameson). As recently as 2025, President Trump ordered all Amelia Earhart records be declassified, but as far as I can tell, there was no bombshell revelation in the documents.

The simplest explanation is the same as the official one: Amelia ran out of fuel without finding Howland Island, and she sank into the ocean. Whether she was pressured into this flight or not, whether she was qualified for this flight or not, Amelia had tried again for a last grand adventure. In the very words she had used before her first trans-Atlantic flight, she had “played for a large stake.” Only this time it didn’t work out, and she did “pop off” in the middle of it. One can only hope she thought it was worthwhile.

When George Putnam published a book on it (because of course, he did), he said that Amelia had often told him “When I go, I’d like best to go in my plane. Quickly” (Earhart, Last Flight, xii). And I really do think that’s what happened.

What is certain is that she has inspired thousands of women in aviation ever since.

I have a special thanks today to Niamh, who made a one-time donation on Buy Me a Coffee. Fabulous people like Niamh make it possible to keep doing this. If you’re able to be equally fabulous, there are several options. Subscribers on Patreon and Substack can get benefits like the weekly newsletter and bonus podcast episodes and ad-free episodes. You can also do a one-time purchase of supporter’s only bonus episode on Brownie Wise, the businesswoman who convinced housewives to buy Tupperware. All of it is much appreciated!

Selected Sources

Butler, Susan. East to the Dawn : The Life of Amelia Earhart. Cambridge, Ma: Da Capo Press, 2009.

Earhart, Amelia. Last Flight. Harcourt Brace, 1937.

———. Letters from Amelia, 1901-1937. Beacon Press, 1982.

———. The Fun of It. Academy Press Limited, 1977.

Jameson, W C. Amelia Earhart : Beyond the Grave. Lanham: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2016.

Shapiro, Laurie Gwen. The Aviator and the Showman. Penguin, 2025.