Finding Amelia: Part 1 | Who Was Amelia Earhart?

Why do you think Amelia kept pushing herself and pushing other women aviators forward?

It was really, I would say, kind of a, a personal mission of Amelia to prove that women were just as capable of men.

This was a time when many women were housewives, and she wanted to get women out of the kitchen and into the cockpit.

She wanted to demonstrate that you could indeed have a career outside of marriage, and it was important to her to prove that.

So, you know, with each first she took, she continued to cement that reality.

That was very inspirational, but that doesn't mean that it was easy.

It was not easy at all.

I think it's important to level set that this was a time when flying was really dangerous.

You had very rudimentary tools.

The cockpit was very noisy, very, very loud.

Just to kind of give a, a couple moments of context, when Amelia flew, your cruising altitude a lot of times was 10,000 feet, whereas nowadays, it's usually, like, anywhere from 30 to 42,000 feet.

So you can imagine the turbulence that you are going to experience in those types of conditions, which takes an element of physical strength, right? And in that time too, there wasn't any tools or, or anyone telling you that you were about ready to approach tough weather, so you had to make a call in that moment to either try to go around it or, or go through it, and those conditions posed lots and lots of different challenges along the way.

And during her 1932 transatlantic flight, another example is that she encountered a lot of bad weather, which she made the flight, but ultimately, her destination was supposed to be Paris, but instead she landed in Northern Ireland due to those weather complications.

Even though it was successful, like, she had to pivot and make a different call.

All of those things indicate how hard it was, how physical it had to be, so her trying to prove that equality, I think, even more stands out to me of not only were you trying to achieve these firsts, but there was a lot of physical, mental, technological challenges that she had to overcome as a part of that journey.

And at a time, too, when air races were gaining more and more notoriety, that was another challenge for her.

She would enter these races, and a lot of times, the, the restrictions, the opportunities were different for men than they were for women, which she found very challenging and was very vocal about and openly shared her thoughts and opinions on how that was structured.

Uh, but I think one of the most powerful examples of the biases that she was fighting at the time in 1935, so this would've been just a little bit prior to her around-the-world flight, there was actually a recommendation that was passed by the Civil Aeronautics Administration, which was the predecessor to the Federal Aviation Administration, that stated that women should not fly near or during their menstrual cycles because they could have fainting spells, and it could cause fatal results.

Like, can you even imagine? That was an official recommendation.

So despite all of, you know, whether it be in an air race, whether it be these types of recommendations, she just kept persisting, and I think that definitely speaks to the strength of a Boilermaker in that essence is that she just kept going, no matter the obstacle, for what she believed in.