Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart was born in 1897 in Kansas, in the middle of the United States, about as far from the world's great airfields as it was possible to be. She grew up restless and curious, refusing to accept that some things were simply "not for girls." When she first sat in a small plane at an air show, the experience changed the direction of her whole life. "By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground," she later wrote, "I knew I had to fly."

In 1921 she began taking lessons from one of the few female instructors in America, Neta Snook, and within months she had bought her own bright-yellow biplane, which she named "The Canary." She worked ordinary jobs to pay for it. The following year, still a beginner, she flew it to 14,000 feet and set a women's altitude record — the first of many firsts.

In 1928 she was invited to cross the Atlantic by plane, though only as a passenger while two men did the flying. The trip made her famous overnight, but the fame embarrassed her: she had done nothing, she felt, but sit there "like a sack of potatoes." So she made a quiet promise to herself. One day she would cross that same ocean alone, as the pilot.

On 20 May 1932, exactly five years after Charles Lindbergh's famous solo crossing, Earhart took off alone from Newfoundland, on the eastern edge of Canada, and pointed her red Lockheed Vega out over the Atlantic. The flight was brutal. Thick ice formed on the wings and sent the plane spinning toward the sea before she pulled it level. A cracked exhaust pipe burned through the night, and fuel began to leak. After almost fifteen hours she gave up on Paris and came down in a field in Northern Ireland, startling a farmer who asked if she had flown far. "From America," she answered.

She was now the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, and one of only two people who had ever done it. The world celebrated her, and she used that fame deliberately and well. She lectured, wrote best-selling books, designed practical clothes for women, and helped found an organisation for female pilots. She argued, again and again, that women could do anything men could do, and she made herself the living proof. More records followed — solo flights across the United States, and the first solo flight from Hawaii to California.

But one great challenge remained, the longest and most daring of all. No one had yet flown around the world at its widest point, close to the equator — roughly 29,000 miles. By 1937 Earhart had decided it would be hers. It would be, she admitted, her last big flight. After this, she said, she would settle down.

For the world flight she chose a powerful twin-engine Lockheed Electra and an experienced navigator, Fred Noonan, to find the way across the empty oceans. By the end of June 1937 they had already flown some 22,000 miles, hopping from country to country, and only the vast Pacific lay ahead. They reached Lae, in New Guinea, with about 7,000 miles still to go. The next leg was the hardest of the whole journey: 2,500 miles of open water to a target barely two miles long — Howland Island, a flat speck in the middle of the Pacific. A United States ship, the Itasca, waited there to guide them in by radio.

They took off from Lae on the morning of 2 July 1937 and flew on through the day and into the night. As they neared Howland, something went wrong with the radio. The ship could hear Earhart's voice, growing tense, but she could not hear them, and the two could not fix their positions to each other. "We must be on you, but cannot see you," she called. "Fuel is running low." Her last clear message came through in the morning, calm but urgent — a line of position, a string of numbers — and then nothing. She and Noonan never arrived. They were never seen again.

The United States launched the largest sea search in its history, but no certain trace of the plane or its crew was ever found. Almost ninety years later, no one has solved the mystery. The official conclusion is that they ran out of fuel and went down at sea; others believe they landed on a remote island and died there as castaways. Expeditions have returned to the Pacific again and again — with sonar, robot submarines and old photographs — and the search has never really stopped. Earhart wanted to do something no one had done before. In disappearing, she did exactly that: she became one of the most enduring mysteries of the twentieth century.