Amelia Earhart set down her Lockheed Vega in a farmer's field near Derry after nearly 15 hours battling ice, fog, and a leaking fuel tank on her flight from Newfoundland. She startled a local farmhand who asked if she had flown far; she replied, 'From America.' The flight, five years after Lindbergh's, cemented her status as aviation's most famous woman.
Earhart had originally planned to fly all the way to Paris to match Lindbergh's route, but a cracked exhaust manifold, ice buildup, and a fuel gauge malfunction forced her to abandon that ambition and simply find land. She descended through storm clouds looking for anywhere flat enough to land.
She finally spotted a green pasture outside the village of Culmore near Derry and put the Vega down, scattering a herd of cows. A farmhand named Cecil Cornock reportedly witnessed the landing and helped her cover the aircraft. Earhart's famously understated first words to him became one of aviation's great deadpan lines.
The flight made her the first woman, and only the second person after Lindbergh, to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. It transformed her from a well-known aviatrix, already famous for being a passenger on a 1928 transatlantic flight, into a genuine pilot-hero, paving the way for her later, fatal attempt to circle the globe in 1937.
Key people: Amelia Earhart