Earhart’s relationship with George Putnam was becoming more serious. Ten years her senior, Putnam basked in the publicity he had brought the young flier. When he divorced his wife of 18 years, Earhart reluctantly agreed to marry him after agonizing over the decision. The wedding was held February 7, 1931. She later described their marriage as “a reasonable partnership…conducted under a satisfactory system of dual control.”

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By the time Earhart was married, there were about 300 licensed women pilots in the United States, and many of them were competing for the fame that records brought. Among them were Bobbi Trout, Laura Ingalls, Elinor Smith and Ruth Nichols. Competitive by nature, Amelia needed something to keep her name in the news. Her husband ordered an autogiro for her a week after their marriage, but she did not wait for her own machine to be delivered to make another record-setting attempt. She set an altitude record for men and women of 18,415 feet on April 8, 1931, in an autogiro borrowed from the Pitcairn-Cierva Autogiro Co.

Earhart canceled her order for an autogiro when the Beech-Nut Co. offered its autogiro for a transcontinental flight; she flew it to the West Coast in nine days. She had an accident at Abilene on the return trip when, as she put it, “the air just went out from under me.” The autogiro hit two cars and damaged the craft’s rotor and propeller, but Earhart was unhurt. It was replaced by another autogiro, and she continued her trip east. However, she was issued a formal reprimand for “carelessness and poor judgment” after the accident from the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce. She made two more trips that year and had a minor crackup in Detroit.

One January morning in 1932, Earhart put down the newspaper she had been reading and asked her husband, “Would you mind if I flew the Atlantic–alone?” He agreed, and the two of them secretly began to make preparations for her to use a Lockheed Vega she had bought in 1929. Bernt Balchen, who had piloted Commander Byrd across the Atlantic in 1927, agreed to rebuild and test the Vega, which she had damaged at Norfolk in 1930.

Balchen and Eddie Gorski, a skilled mechanic, installed a 420-gallon gas tank in the fuselage, a new engine and new instruments, including a drift indicator, two compasses and a directional gyro. Balchen taught Earhart to fly using instruments and then quietly checked her out in the renovated Vega. The weather was improving over the Atlantic, and Balchen flew Earhart to Harbour Grace, Newfoundland. She took off for Paris on the afternoon of May 20, 1932–the fifth anniversary of Lindbergh’s Atlantic flight. Fourteen hours 54 minutes later, after being driven off course by strong north winds and overcompensating for southward drift, she landed in a pasture near Londonderry in Northern Ireland. It had been a fatiguing flight through storms and icing conditions with a leaky gas line and a burned-out exhaust pipe. Lindbergh had been honored with far more awards and receptions after his transatlantic crossing than he had anticipated. Now the same thing was happening to Earhart. She was besieged by reporters and photographers as she traveled to London, France, Belgium and Italy to be decorated. Back home, at a National Geographic Society dinner in her honor, she received the society’s gold medal from President Herbert Hoover. Congress voted Earhart the Distinguished Flying Cross; she was the first woman to be so honored. It was presented to her by Vice President Charles Curtis for “displaying heroic courage and skill as a navigator at the risk of her life.” In writing about the flight, Earhart said she had made it to prove that “women can do most things that a man can do.” Not everything, she added, but certainly “jobs requiring intelligence, coordination, speed, coolness, and will power.”

Next, Earhart planned another record-setting flight in the Vega. On August 24 and 25, 1932, she set a women’s nonstop transcontinental speed record, flying 2,447.8 miles from Los Angeles to Newark in 19 hours 5 minutes. The following year on July 7 and 8, she broke her own record by making the flight in 17 hours 7 minutes 30 seconds, winning the Harmon Trophy.

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