In November Earhart began a whirlwind tour of 13 southeastern states. During this trip, she sometimes made appearances on behalf of charities. For example, in Raleigh, N.C., she arrived a day early to help a local organization raise funds to prevent the city from having to start a soup and bread line, a common situation in the Depression era. She stayed from two to four days at each of her stopovers during the tour.

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Earhart went on to cross the Atlantic solo in a Lockheed Vega on May 20, 1932, five years to the day after Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis flight. That achievement satisfied a personal goal—to be worthy of the nickname Lady Lindy. She also received a spate of national and international awards for the flight, among them America’s Distinguished Flying Cross.

Earhart’s increasing fame enabled her to champion the role of women in aviation. One of the founders of the Ninety-Nines, Inc., an international organization of women pilots, she became the group’s first president. In 1935 she took on a new job, counseling female students at Purdue University.

In 1937 the aviatrix made the fateful decision to tackle a globe-circling route that no pilot had attempted, flying “the world at its waistline” by following the equator. The attempt would be funded by donations to Purdue, passed on to Earhart to establish a “Purdue Flying Laboratory” that would further the cause of women in aviation.

Earhart logged 22,000 miles during a month of travel before arriving at Lae, New Guinea. When she took off from Lae in a Lockheed Electra on a hot July morning with her navigator, Fred Noonan, she planned to land at tiny Howland Island before continuing on to Hawaii and California. As all the world knows, Earhart and Noonan never reached the atoll, and to date the Electra has not been located, despite continuing efforts and the expenditure of millions of dollars. Unfortunately, the mystery surrounding Earhart’s untimely disappearance just weeks before her fortieth birthday has overshadowed her numerous accomplishments during the Golden Age of flight.

Autogiros similar to the one dubbed “the flying windmill” by the press during Earhart’s transcontinental tour are rare now. The 1941 Pitcairn PA-39 autogiro Miss Champion, once owned by Champion Spark Plugs, is on permanent display at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Air Venture Museum in Oshkosh, Wisc.

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