Earhart's 1932 solo transatlantic flight and record-setting career made her one of the most celebrated aviators of the twentieth century, a symbol of daring and independence for women worldwide. She vanished in 1937 attempting to circumnavigate the globe, and her disappearance remains one of aviation's enduring mysteries.
Earhart grew up something of a tomboy in Kansas, keeping a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about successful women in male-dominated fields—law, business, engineering, film production—long before she ever flew a plane. Her first flight, a ten-minute hop as a passenger in Los Angeles in 1920, converted her instantly; she later said she knew by the time the plane left the ground that she had to fly herself.
Her fame exploded in 1928 when she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, though only as a passenger, a fact that embarrassed her enough to push toward the solo 1932 crossing that made her a genuine record-holder rather than a mere publicity passenger. She battled ice, a leaking fuel gauge, and flames from a cracked engine manifold on that flight before landing in a pasture in Northern Ireland, startling a farmhand who asked if she'd flown far. 'From America,' she said.
Her final flight, attempting to circle the globe near the equator in 1937, ended when her plane disappeared over the Pacific near Howland Island. Despite the largest air-and-sea search in American history at the time, no confirmed wreckage was ever found, and theories about her fate still generate expeditions and controversy today.