Amelia Earhart

• 1. Introduction

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  Amelia Earhart climbed out of a single-engine airplane in a pasture in Northern Ireland, and a farm hand asked the obvious question. “Have you flown far?” he said. She answered, “From America.” The woman in the pasture was Amelia Earhart, an American aviator who would become the most recognized woman pilot of her time. Her life ended in a way nobody has been able to settle. In 1937 she vanished over the Pacific Ocean during an attempt to fly around the world. This documentary asks how a restless girl from Kansas ended up in that pasture. It asks what fame gave her and what it demanded in return. It also asks why, long after the search ended, her disappearance still pulls in expeditions, theorists and storytellers.

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• 2. A Kansas Childhood

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  Amelia Mary Earhart was born on the 24th of July 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, inside the home of her maternal grandfather. Alfred Gideon Otis was a former judge, the president of Atchison Savings Bank and a leading resident of the town. He had not been pleased by his daughter's marriage, and he was unimpressed with how her husband Edwin was doing as a lawyer. Amelia was the second child, born after a stillbirth in August 1896. Family custom gave her the names of both her grandmothers.

  From the start, Amelia led and her sister Grace Muriel, two years younger, followed. Amelia answered to “Meeley” and sometimes “Millie”, while Grace was “Pidge”. Their mother, Amy, said she did not want to raise “nice little girls”. The sisters wore bloomers, which their grandmother disapproved of, though Amelia loved the freedom of movement. They climbed trees, hunted rats with a rifle and sledded downhill. They also kept a collection of worms, moths, katydids and a tree toad.

  In 1904, with her uncle's help, Amelia built a ramp modelled on a roller coaster she had seen on a trip to St. Louis, Missouri. She fixed it to the roof of the family tool shed and launched herself down it in a wooden box. She climbed out with a bruised lip, a torn dress and what she called a “sensation of exhilaration”. Her first words to her sister were, “Oh, Pidge, it's just like flying!”

  Real airplanes impressed her far less. In 1907 her father's job as a claims officer for the Rock Island Railroad moved the family to Des Moines, Iowa. At the Iowa State Fair the following year, ten-year-old Amelia saw her first aircraft. Her father tried to tempt his daughters into a ride, but she took one look at the biplane and asked to go back to the merry-go-round. She later described it as “a thing of rusty wire and wood and not at all interesting”.

  The family's comfort did not last. Edwin Earhart was an alcoholic, and in 1914 he was forced to retire from the railroad, which never took him back. When Amelia's grandmother Amelia Otis died, she put her daughter's share of the estate in a trust, fearing Edwin's drinking would drain it. The Otis house and its contents were auctioned. Amelia later called this the end of her childhood.

  In 1915 Edwin found a clerk's job with the Great Northern Railway in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Amelia entered Central High School as a junior. When that arrangement collapsed, Amy took the children to Chicago to live with friends. Amelia searched the city's high schools for the best science program. She turned down the one nearest her home because its chemistry lab looked “just like a kitchen sink”. At Hyde Park High School she spent a lonely semester, and a yearbook caption pictured her as the girl in brown who walks alone. She graduated in 1916.

  Throughout these years she kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about women succeeding in male-dominated careers, including film direction, law, advertising, management and mechanical engineering. She started junior college at the Ogontz School in Rydal, Pennsylvania, but did not finish. A Christmas visit to her sister in 1917 would soon send her in a very different direction.

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• 3. Learning to Fly

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  At Spadina Military Hospital in Toronto, Earhart trained with the Red Cross as a nurse's aide after seeing wounded soldiers return from the First World War. She prepared food for patients on special diets and handed out prescribed medication in the dispensary. There she heard stories from military pilots, and her interest in flying began.

  In early November 1918, during the Spanish flu pandemic, she was working night shifts when she became infected. She was hospitalized with pneumonia and maxillary sinusitis and discharged about two months later, in December. Doctors in the pre-antibiotic era washed out the infected sinus in painful minor operations that did not work. Her convalescence lasted nearly a year at her sister's home in Northampton, Massachusetts. She read poetry, learned the banjo and studied mechanics. The sinus trouble never left her; later in life she sometimes wore a bandage on her cheek to hide a small drainage tube.

  In the early 1920s, at an air fair held alongside the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, a World War I ace spotted Earhart and a friend watching from an isolated clearing. He dived straight at them. “I am sure he said to himself, ‘Watch me make them scamper,’” she recalled. She stood her ground. “I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by,” she said.

  On the 28th of December 1920, she and her father attended an aerial meet at Daugherty Field in Long Beach, California. She asked him to find out about passenger flights and lessons. The next day she paid $10 for a ten-minute flight with Frank Hawks, who later became a well-known air racer. “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground,” she said, “I knew I had to fly.”

  The following month she hired Neta Snook as her instructor, on a contract for 12 hours of lessons at $500. To pay for it she worked as a photographer, a truck driver and a stenographer at the local telephone company, and she saved $1,000. Her mother contributed part of that sum, against her better judgement. Her first lesson came on the 3rd of January 1921 at Kinner Field. To reach it she took a bus and then walked 4 miles. Snook trained her in a crash-salvaged Curtiss JN-4 “Canuck” that she had restored.

  Earhart cropped her hair short like other female flyers. In mid-1921, against Snook's advice, she bought a secondhand, chromium yellow Kinner Airster biplane and nicknamed it “The Canary”. After her first solo landing she bought a leather flying coat. Her friends teased her about how new it looked, so she slept in it and stained it with aircraft oil. On the 22nd of October 1922 she flew the Airster to 14,000 feet, a world record for female pilots. On the 16th of May 1923 she became the 16th woman in the United States to receive a pilot's license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. Hers was number 6017.

  Money then ran out. A failed investment in a gypsum mine, together with her mother's administration of the estate, wiped out her inheritance. She sold the Canary and a second Kinner and bought a two-seat Kissel Gold Bug automobile she named “Yellow Peril”. Her sinus pain worsened, and in early 1924 another operation failed. After her parents divorced that year, she drove her mother on a transcontinental trip that included Banff, Alberta, and ended in Boston. There a third operation finally worked. Her plans for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology collapsed because her mother could no longer afford the tuition.

  In 1925 Earhart became a teacher and then a social worker at Denison House, a Boston settlement house, and lived in Medford. She joined the Boston chapter of the American Aeronautical Society and was elected its vice president. She invested a small sum in Dennison Airport in Quincy and flew its first official flight in 1927. She also sold Kinner aircraft and wrote local newspaper columns promoting flying. As her local celebrity grew, she began planning an organization for female flyers.

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• 4. The Friendship Flight

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  In early 1928, American heiress Amy Phipps Guest announced that she meant to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air. She was living in London with her husband, Frederick Guest, a former British Air Minister, and Charles Lindbergh's 1927 flight had inspired her. She hired pilot Wilmer Stultz and mechanic Louis Gordon. For an aircraft she bought a Fokker F.VIIb Tri-Motor from the explorer Richard E. Byrd. Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford, had suggested Byrd use a Ford Tri-Motor instead, so Byrd sold the Fokker. Guest named it Friendship, in honor of ties between the United States and her adopted Britain.

  Her family reacted with alarm. Her sons, Winston and Raymond, even threatened to quit Yale and Cambridge. Guest gave up the flight herself but not the goal, and she set out to find what she called “the right sort of girl”. The candidate had to be a pilot, well-educated, well-mannered, physically attractive and American.

  In April 1928, publicist George Palmer Putnam, who had published Lindbergh's best-selling book “WE”, heard that Byrd had sold his plane to a mysterious buyer. Putnam sent his friend Captain Hilton Railey to investigate. Railey found Stultz in a bar, in a talkative mood, and learned the real purpose of the newly fitted seaplane. Railey then asked Rear Admiral Reginald Belknap in Boston for a candidate. Belknap's answer was immediate: “Call Denison House and ask for Amelia Earhart.”

  Railey asked her the moment she walked in: “How would you like to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic?” Earhart later wrote, “Under the circumstances... I couldn't say no.” She set a condition, though. She did not want to be a mere passenger and wanted a turn at the controls. She had no experience with multi-engine aircraft or flying by instruments alone. Even so, her contract named her commander aboard, with final authority over policy, procedure and personnel at least until London. Stultz and Gordon would serve under her.

  On the 3rd of June 1928, three attempts to take off from the Jeffries Yacht Club in East Boston failed. The crew unloaded six five-gallon cans of fuel, and backup pilot Lou Gower stepped aside to save weight. On the fourth try, Friendship climbed away after 67 tense seconds. A stop at Halifax, Nova Scotia, forced by bad weather, delayed arrival at Trepassey, Newfoundland, until the 5th of June. Earhart likened the harbor to a rodeo, with “maritime cowboys” in small boats fighting to tow the plane.

  Gales, fog and engine trouble held the crew there for nearly a fortnight. On the 17th of June, the dawn was clear, and Earhart insisted on going despite objections from Stultz, who was nursing a severe hangover. At Harbour Grace, the rival aircraft Columbia stayed grounded because its captain, Oliver LeBoutillier, would not risk the weather. His passenger, the socialite Mabel Boll, was furious. She claimed the Friendship crew had been given a better forecast. The local meteorologist insisted both crews received identical reports.

  Fog and cloud forced Stultz to fly on instruments for the whole crossing, so Earhart could not take the controls. She kept the flight log and helped check navigation, while Gordon watched fuel and engines. Several hours in, the crew spotted the ocean liner SS America about 75 miles southeast of Cobh, Ireland. Captain George Fried ordered the ship's name and position chalked on the deck, but Friendship vanished into the mist before the message was ready. The radio had failed early, so nobody on the ground knew where the plane was.

  After nearly 21 hours aloft, low on fuel, the crew followed a coast they could not identify. It was South Wales. They landed in the Burry Estuary, between Burry Port and the village of Pwll in Carmarthenshire. Gordon climbed onto a pontoon and tied the plane to a navigation buoy with emergency rope. The local response was slight. Railway workers watched from the shore. Eventually Norman Fisher, a manager at the Frickers Metal Company, rowed out, and Stultz went ashore with him to contact the sponsors waiting in Southampton.

  Earhart and Gordon stayed aboard, since the flight was not yet considered complete. Railey arrived by seaplane with Allen Raymond, a reporter for The New York Times. After discussing fuel, the tides and the poor visibility, they moved Friendship to Burry Port Harbour, where the crew were rowed ashore. Police escorted them to the Frickers office through a large, excited crowd.

  Reporters crowded in, and most of them wanted Earhart. She insisted that Stultz deserved the credit for the flying and called herself “just baggage, like a sack of potatoes”. She added, “maybe someday I'll try it alone.”

  The next morning, the 19th of June, at about 11 a.m., Friendship set off for Southampton. Among the spectators was Sir Arthur Whitten Brown, who with John Alcock had made the first nonstop transatlantic flight in 1919. He lived in nearby Swansea and had come with his family to hand Earhart a bouquet. A boat was sent for him, but the crew had already started their departure, and the two pioneers missed each other. At Southampton, Earhart met Amy Guest in person for the first time. She also flew an Avro Avian owned by the Irish aviator Lady Mary Heath, and later acquired that aircraft and shipped it to the United States.

  Back home, a ticker-tape parade ran through New York's Canyon of Heroes on the 6th of July 1928. President Calvin Coolidge received the crew at the White House. Earhart wrote a book about the flight titled “20 Hrs. 40 Min.”, though her own log recorded 20 hours and 49 minutes. Her fame quickly outgrew that of her crewmates.

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• 5. Lady Lindy

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  The press called her “Lady Lindy” because she looked like Charles Lindbergh, and also “Queen of the Air”. Straight after her return she began an exhausting lecture tour that ran through 1928 and 1929. Putnam managed the campaign, which included her book, new lecture tours and her photograph in advertisements for products such as luggage. She even took a Lucky Strike cigarette endorsement, sending the money to Byrd's coming South Pole expedition. McCall's magazine then withdrew its offer to make her aviation editor.

  She did more than lend her name. Earhart threw herself into fashion promotions, and “active living” lines sold at stores such as Macy's. They paired simple, natural lines with washable, wrinkle-proof fabrics. The look suited the sleek but feminine “A.E.”, as her family and friends called her. The income paid for her flying.

  She also used her platform for aviation itself. As associate editor at Cosmopolitan, she campaigned for public acceptance of flying, especially for women. In 1929, Transcontinental Air Transport named her and Margaret Bartlett Thornton to promote air travel to women. Earhart helped set up the Ludington Airline, a shuttle service between New York and Washington, D.C. She also became vice president of National Airways, which ran Boston-Maine Airways and other northeastern lines.

  Her personal life was just as carefully negotiated. She had been engaged to Samuel Chapman, a Boston chemical engineer, but broke it off on the 23rd of November 1928. By then she had reportedly spent the summer writing her first book at the home of Putnam and his first wife, and having an affair with him. Putnam divorced in 1929 and proposed to Earhart six times before she said yes.

  They married on the 7th of February 1931, in Putnam's mother's house in Noank, Connecticut. Some have called it a marriage of convenience. She gave him a letter on the wedding day describing a “partnership” with “dual control”. In it she wrote that she would not hold him to “any midaevil code of faithfulness”, and that she might need “some place where I can go to be by myself”. She added that she could not promise to endure “the confinement of even an attractive cage”.

  She kept her own name. When The New York Times called her “Mrs. Putnam”, she laughed it off, and Putnam learned he would be called “Mr. Earhart”. There was no honeymoon, because she was on a nine-day cross-country tour promoting autogyros and the tour's sponsor, Beech-Nut chewing gum. The couple had no children, but Putnam had two sons from his first marriage, the explorer and writer David Binney Putnam and George Palmer Putnam Jr.

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• 6. Records and Rivals

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  On the 20th of May 1932-34-year-old Earhart took off from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, carrying a copy of the Telegraph-Journal. Journalist Stuart Trueman had given it to her to prove the date. She aimed for Paris in her single-engine Lockheed Vega 5B, to match Lindbergh's solo flight of five years earlier. The Norwegian-American aviator Bernt Balchen prepared the plane and served as a decoy for the press, pretending to ready it for his own Arctic flight. Strong northerly winds, ice and mechanical problems made for a 14-hour, 56-minute crossing, and she came down near Culmore, north of Derry. Cecil King and T. Sawyer saw the landing.

  Congress gave her the Distinguished Flying Cross. France made her a Knight of the Legion of Honor, and President Herbert Hoover presented the Gold Medal of the National Geographic Society. Her new fame brought her close to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who shared her interest in women's causes. After a flight with Earhart, Roosevelt obtained a student permit but never pursued learning to fly. Jacqueline Cochran, said to be Earhart's rival, became her confidante.

  Earlier, in August 1928, Earhart had become the first woman to fly solo across North America and back. In 1929 she entered the first Women's Air Derby, nicknamed the “Powder Puff Derby” by Will Rogers. It ran from Santa Monica, California, on the 18th of August to Cleveland, Ohio, on the 26th. At the second-to-last stop, Columbus, her friend Ruth Nichols hit a tractor and flipped her plane. Earhart finished third in the heavy-plane division. General Leigh Wade, who flew with her that year, called her “a born flier, with a delicate touch on the stick”.

  After the derby, Earhart called a meeting of female pilots. The group took its name from the number of charter members, becoming the Ninety-Nines, and in 1930 she was its first president. That year she also became an official of the National Aeronautic Association. She pushed for separate women's records and helped persuade the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale to adopt an international standard. On the 8th of April 1931 she set an altitude record of 18,415 feet in a Pitcairn PCA-2 autogyro borrowed from Beech-Nut. When the 1934 Bendix Trophy Race banned women, she refused to fly the film star Mary Pickford to Cleveland to open it.

  On the 11th of January 1935, Earhart became the first aviator to fly solo from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California. Many had tried the route, including participants in the 1927 Dole Air Race, which flew the opposite direction and killed three people. Her flight was largely routine, and in her last hours she listened to a Metropolitan Opera broadcast. On the 19th of April she flew from Los Angeles to Mexico City in the Vega she called “old Bessie, the fire horse”. After a nonstop flight to Newark on the 8th of May, crowds there worried her because she had to avoid taxiing into them.

  The 1935 Bendix race showed her limits. She finished fifth, the best a stock Vega with a top speed of 195 mph could do against purpose-built aircraft exceeding 300 mph. Competitor Cecil Allen died in a fire at takeoff, and fog and thunderstorms plagued the field. Between 1930 and 1935 she set seven women's speed-and-distance records. Still, she knew her “lovely red Vega” was wrong for long ocean flights, and she began to dream of the “one flight which I most wanted to attempt”, a circumnavigation “as near its waistline as could be”.

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• 7. The Last Flight

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  Purdue University gave $50,000 toward the aircraft that Earhart hoped would take her around the world. She had joined Purdue in 1935 as a visiting faculty member, counseling women on careers and advising the Department of Aeronautics. The university created the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research. In July 1936, Lockheed built a twin-engine Electra 10E in Burbank, California, with extra fuel tanks and other modifications. She called it her “flying laboratory”. Her route followed roughly the equator, making it 29,000 miles, the longest circumnavigation attempted.

  She chose Harry Manning as navigator. He was a pilot, a skilled radio operator who knew Morse code, and the captain of the SS President Roosevelt, the ship that had brought her home from Europe in 1928. During a cross-country test flight, one fix of his put them in the wrong state. Later, in a night test arranged by Putnam and Paul Mantz, he was off by 20 miles. Biographers Elgen and Marie Long thought that was within an acceptable error of 30 miles, but Mantz and Putnam wanted better. They brought in Fred Noonan, a licensed ship's captain who had left Pan American Airways after setting up most of its China Clipper routes across the Pacific.

  The first attempt began on the 17th of March 1937, from Oakland to Honolulu with Earhart, Noonan, Manning and Mantz aboard. Problems with the propeller hubs sent the plane to Luke Field at Pearl Harbor for servicing. Three days later, on takeoff, the Electra ground-looped, its forward landing gear collapsed and both propellers hit the ground. The cause is not known. Witnesses, including an Associated Press journalist, said a tire blew, while Mantz and some others blamed pilot error. The damaged plane went back to Burbank for repairs.

  For the second attempt, they reversed direction to fly west to east, partly because wind and weather patterns along the route had shifted. Putnam pressed to strip out navigation, communication and safety equipment to save weight. Manning, the only skilled radio operator, was gone, leaving just Earhart and Noonan. They left Miami on the 1st of June 1937. Along the way came dysentery for Earhart in the Dutch East Indies and a repaired direction finder at Darwin, Australia, where they sent their parachutes home. They reached Lae, New Guinea, on the 29th of June, with about 22,000 miles done and 7,000 over the Pacific still to go.

  On the 2nd of July 1937, at 10:00 a.m. local time, the heavily loaded Electra left Lae with about 1,100 US gallons of gasoline. The target was Howland Island, a flat sliver of land 6,500 feet long, 1,600 feet wide and about 10 feet high, some 2,556 miles away. The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca waited there to send a homing signal, take direction-finding bearings and make a column of dark smoke from its boilers. Every one of those methods failed.

  Itasca heard Earhart, who identified herself as KHAQQ, strong and clear, but she could not hear Itasca's voice. At 6:14 a.m. she said she was within 200 miles and asked for a bearing, then whistled into the microphone to give the ship a steady signal. Radioman Leo Bellarts later said he “was sitting there sweating blood because I couldn't do a darn thing about it”, because Itasca's direction finder could not tune to her frequency of 3105 kHz. At 6:45 a.m. she estimated 100 miles. A radio log from 7:30 to 7:40 a.m. noted only a half hour of fuel left. At 7:58 a.m. she said she could not hear Itasca and asked for voice signals. Her own signal reached the ship at the loudest possible strength, which meant she was nearby. Itasca sent Morse code instead, and she could hear it but could not tell its direction.

  Several things may have gone wrong. Earhart and Itasca had planned their schedule using time systems a half hour apart, Greenwich Civil Time and a Naval time-zone system. Her direction-finding set, with a new Bendix receiver, had been fitted just before the flight. Her only training was a brief introduction from Joe Gurr at the Lockheed factory, and the card showing its band settings was mounted where she could not see it. A blown fuse had once knocked the equipment out on the way to Darwin. Near Howland she could hear Itasca on 7500 kHz but could not find the minimum signal that would show direction. She had also failed to find one during a test at Lae.

  Her last voice message said she and Noonan were flying along a line of position running 157-337 degrees, which Noonan would have drawn on a chart as passing through Howland. After that, attempts to reach them by voice and Morse code went unanswered. Operators across the Pacific and in the United States may have caught weak or unintelligible signals from the Electra.

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• 8. The Search and the Legend

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  The air-and-sea search by the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard cost $4 million, the costliest and most intensive in American history up to that time. About an hour after her last message, Itasca searched north and west of Howland, and the Navy joined within days. Official efforts lasted until the 19th of July 1937. No physical trace of Earhart, Noonan or the Electra was found. On the 3rd and the 6th of July, an Oakland radio amateur reported hearing emergency calls that seemed to come from Earhart. Many such transmissions were hoaxes. The captain of USS Colorado said the calls from many stations only added to the “confusion and doubtfulness” of reports.

  Putnam would not stop. In late July 1937 he chartered two small boats and directed a search of other islands from the United States. To pay for it he became trustee of Earhart's estate and asked a Los Angeles probate court to waive the seven-year wait for a declaration of death in absentia. She was legally declared dead on the 5th of January 1939.

  The U.S. government concluded that her plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea. In the 1970s, retired Navy captain Laurance Safford studied the radio records at length and judged the flight poorly planned and worse executed. Retired rear admiral Richard R. Black, who was in the Itasca radio room, said in 1982 that the Electra “went into the sea about 10 am, the 2nd of July 1937, not far from Howland”. Putnam's son George Palmer Putnam Jr. believed “the plane just ran out of gas”. Biographer Susan Butler places the wreck on the seafloor at a depth of 17,000 feet. Tom D. Crouch of the National Air and Space Museum has compared its archaeological importance to that of RMS Titanic. Historian Roy Nesbit concluded the Electra was not fully fueled at Lae. William L. Polhemous, who navigated Ann Pellegreno's 1967 retracing flight, suspected Noonan may have miscalculated the “single line approach” to Howland.

  Expeditions have kept looking. In 2003 and 2006, David Jourdan swept a 1,200-square-mile area north and west of Howland with deep-sea sonar for $4.5 million and found no wreckage. In 2019, Robert Ballard led a search around Nikumaroro Island and found nothing. In 2024, Tony Romeo funded another expedition around Howland, also without success.

  Most historians believe Earhart and Noonan crashed and sank, but other ideas persist. The Gardner Island hypothesis says they flew south and landed on Nikumaroro, in the Phoenix Islands. Despite many expeditions, no definitive link has been found. The Japanese capture theory holds that Japanese forces seized them, and some of Earhart's relatives have believed it. The New Britain theory says she turned back toward Rabaul. In 1990, Australian Army veteran Donald Angwin said he had seen a wrecked aircraft in the jungle in 1945, but later searches found nothing.

  The strangest claim appeared in the 1970 book “Amelia Earhart Lives”, built on research by Joseph Gervais. It said she survived, changed her name and became Irene Craigmile Bolam. Bolam sued for $1.5 million, and publisher McGraw-Hill withdrew the book and reached an out-of-court settlement. National Geographic Channel revived the claim in a November 2006 episode of “Undiscovered History”. On the 26th of September 2025, President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered all government records on Earhart declassified and released.

  Her name has outlived the mystery. In 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Earhart “created a legacy that resonates today for anyone, girls and boys, who dreams of the stars”. In 2013, Flying magazine ranked her No. 9 among its “51 Heroes of Aviation”. More than 1,000 women of the Women Airforce Service Pilots served in World War II after she inspired a generation of female aviators. The Ninety-Nines maintain her birthplace in Atchison as a museum, and the town has held an Amelia Earhart Festival every year since 1996.

  Tributes take many forms. In 1967, Ann Pellegreno flew a Lockheed 10A Electra around the world along Earhart's planned route and dropped a wreath over Howland. In 1997, Linda Finch of San Antonio retraced the final route in a restored 1935 Electra 10. Since 1938, Zonta International's Amelia Earhart Fellowship has awarded 1,764 fellowships worth more than $11.9 million to 1,335 women from 79 countries. Purdue named Earhart Hall for her in 1964, put up a bronze statue in 2009 and opened the Amelia Earhart Terminal at its airport in 2025. On Howland Island itself stands the Earhart Light, a navigational day beacon that is no longer operational.

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