Saudi Gazette 

 

If you think studying history is boring, think again! History is not only about long ago dates that you have to memorize, history is filled with fun stories about amazing people.

 

Did you ever hear about a woman who loved adventures, Amelia Earhart?

Amelia Earhart was born in the year 1897 in Kansas, a mid-western state in the United States of America. She had a younger sister whose name was Muriel.

 

As a child, Amelia spent a lot of time playing with her little sister; they went on all sorts of adventures together. They collected insects and frogs. They liked to play sports: baseball, football, and tennis. They even tried making a homemade roller coaster, which crashed!

 

To make doing their household chores fun, they used to recite poetry while working around the house.

 

Even though Amelia had fun with her sister, their life as children was not easy because their parents separated and then rejoined again. Their father changed jobs a lot, so the family had to travel a lot. For a while, the two girls lived with their grandparents.

 

After she finished high school, Amelia studied nursing. During World War I she worked as a nurse, helping to treat wounded soldiers. She went to Canada and taught English to children.

 

She entered a college in New York to study medicine, but when her parents got back together again in California, Amelia decided to leave college and go to California to be with her parents.

 

Amelia’s father took her to an airplane show, and she got on a 10 minute airplane ride. Those days, the airplanes were so small, only two people could ride on it. And the cockpit, the place where the pilot controls the plane, is open, making it risky, but I could imagine so thrilling!

That is when Amelia’s love for flying was born.

 

After that flight she said, “I knew I had to fly as soon as the plane was just a few hundred feet off the ground.” 

 

She wanted to start taking flight lessons right away, but the lessons were very expensive. She worked hard at a number of jobs, and with the help of her mother, she was able to take flight lessons. She learned quickly and she soon became an excellent pilot.

 

She bought her very own plane in 1920. It was a bright yellow plane and so she named it ‘The Canary’, like the bird.

 

Amelia became the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean alone by plane. In fact, in May of 1932, she won a world record of crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the shortest time, which was 13 hours and 30 minutes.

 

At the time, flying a plane was a risky business, anything could go wrong, and storms threatened the lives of pilots. But Amelia’s passion and love for flying gave her the courage to go on. She received many awards for her great skill as a pilot.

 

She became the first woman to fly from California to Hawaii, which was a difficult route. She was the first person to fly alone from Los Angeles to Mexico City and then from Mexico City to a city in New Jersey. She even took the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on a flight.

 

She used her popularity to give lectures on women’s rights and encourage girls to go to school, study hard, and work hard.

 

Amelia had bigger dreams; she wanted to fly around the world. On her first try, her plane crashed during take-off, but she did not give up. After her plane was repaired she set off on her journey with a co-pilot, Fred Noonan, in June of 1937. They first flew to Puerto Rico, and then eastward toward Africa. Amelia and Fred flew to the Red Sea, to Karachi, to Pakistan, and to India. Amelia and Fred continued their journey to Bangkok and Singapore.

 

 They then flew to Australia where they made repairs for their plan, and set off again, landing in New Guinea. They took off and were supposed to fly to The Howland Islands, in the Pacific Ocean, but they had problems, and they ran out of gas before they could reach the islands.

 

None knows for sure what happened to Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, whether they drowned in the ocean or were captured. They disappeared. President Roosevelt sent nine naval ships and 66 aircrafts to search the waters, but Amelia, Fred, and their plane was never found.

  

After her disappearance, her husband wrote a book about her called “Soaring Wings.”