As Amelia Earhart increased speed to take off from Willow Grove in December 1930, the cold wind whipped through her short-cropped hair. The engine prerotator of the open-cockpit autogiro she was piloting engaged, and the rotor began spinning—four long blades slicing through the air above her head. Once the autogiro was aloft, air pressure kept the blades whirling. Soon she was sailing over the snowy Pennsylvania fields, practicing takeoffs and landings under the watchful eye of her tutor, James Ray, a test pilot for the Pitcairn-Cierva Autogiro Company. After bringing the autogiro in for a final landing that day, Earhart admitted she didn’t know “whether I flew it or it flew me.”

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The aviatrix had earned fame two years earlier as “Lady Lindy,” the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. She logged about 500 hours of flight time prior to that trip, but did not get to take the controls of the Fokker F.VII trimotor Friendship due to her lack of instrument training. That was left to Wilmer Stultz and mechanic Louis Gordon, both of whom were subsequently eclipsed by their passenger’s sudden notoriety.

Earhart loved flying and kept at it, piloting a Lockheed Vega to third place in the first Women’s Air Derby in 1929 and setting three women’s world speed records in June 1930. In February 1931, she married publisher George Putnam, the promoter who had tapped her for the Friendship flight. Putnam ordered a new autogiro for his bride. The unusual aircraft had been invented by Spanish mathematician Juan de la Cierva in the early 1920s, and was being marketed by his American partner, Harold Pitcairn, developer of Mailwing biplanes.

While waiting for her own rotorcraft to arrive, Earhart borrowed a company model for practice flights. On April 8, 1931, she donned a heavy flying suit, boots and mittens to fly Pitcairn’s PCA-2 model, the fourth such aircraft built. Planning to test the autogiro’s ceiling, she carried an oxygen bottle and had arranged for the National Aeronautic Association to install a sealed barograph in the PCA-2. Putnam, hoping she would do something newsworthy, had invited members of the New York press and Movietone News to watch. The crowd of nearly 500 dispersed after her first flight, but when Earhart sailed into the sky a second time that day she remained airborne for about three hours and set a woman’s autogiro altitude record of 18,415 feet.

Among the firms eager to purchase autogiros for promotional purposes was chewing gum manufacturer Beech-Nut Packing Company, which had already taken delivery of its rotorcraft before Putnam’s was completed. Putnam decided to cancel his own autogiro order and arranged to have Earhart fly Beech-Nut’s bird on a transcontinental tour. He was on hand, along with his son David, to pass out chewing gum when she took off in the company’s vivid green rotorcraft from Newark, N.J., on May 29, 1931, accompanied by mechanic Eddie de Vaught.

Earhart had undergone a tonsillectomy just a month before, but she tackled the strenuous tour with her usual verve. The ungainly looking aircraft, with its stubby wings, 300-hp Wright Whirlwind engine and 45-foot-diameter rotor blades, drew plenty of curious spectators—and so did its famous pilot. Since the autogiro had to be refueled frequently, Earhart made many stops in small communities across the country. The weather also affected her schedule, such as when she had to land at tiny Sidney, Neb., because of strong headwinds. Often she attended luncheons and banquets in her honor dressed in her flying clothes—leather jacket, jodhpurs and boots. She explained to one writer that she had no room in the open cockpit to carry a change of clothes.

Earhart flew an average of five hours a day at about 80 mph in the autogiro. In Wyoming she landed at Cheyenne, Laramie, Parco, Rock Springs and Leroy, towns roughly 100 miles apart. The Wyoming State Tribune estimated she drew half the state capital’s population to see the strange flying contraption when she arrived on June 4. The Rock Springs newspaper claimed that 2,000 people were on hand to watch as the autogiro “dropped almost vertically from the heavens” and made a “safe and somewhat esthetic landing.”

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