Amelia Earhart
by Emma Carignan
Biography
She was born July 24, 1897 in Kansas, and it is suspected that she died July 2, 1937. Her father was a lawyer for a railroad company, and once she turned 12 they moved to different cities so her father could continue working. Her father was eventually fired because he was an alcoholic. After visiting Canada during World War I at age 20 and seeing all the wounded people, she volunteered as a local nurse to help them. During that time, she visited an airfield in Canada and decided that she wanted to learn how to fly. She hired Neta Snook to teach her, and after only two and a half hours of practice, she bought her own plane, taking her first solo flight in 1922. In 1931 she married George Putnam, her agent.
Impact
In 1928, after she became the first female passenger to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, Amelia Earhart became known as a spokesperson for women pilots. Through the years she set a numerous amount of speed and altitude records. In 1932 she became the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. But around July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart’s plane went missing. The plane was supposed to land on Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean, but it never got there. There’s a well known theory that part of her mission was to spy on Japanese islands in the Pacific Ocean as she attempted to fly around the world. According to this theory, the Japanese knew this, intercepted her plane and captured her. No conclusive evidence has been found, but in 2012, plane wreckage was found off the island of Nikumaroro in the Pacific Ocean, and it’s believed that that those could be the remains of Amelia Earhart’s plane.
Amelia Earhart Mini Biography Video
Video Questions
1. Was Amelia a girly-girl?
2. What made her decide to learn how to fly a plane?