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Her flying career began in Los Angeles, California in 1921 when, at age 24, she took flying lessons from Neta Snook and bought her first airplane, a Kinner Airstar. Due to family problems, she sold her airplane in 1924 and moved back East, where she was employed as a social worker. Four years later, she returned to aviation, bought an Avro Avian airplane and became the first woman to make a solo-return transcontinental flight. From then on, she continued to set and break her own speed and distance records, in competitive events, as well as personal stunts promoted by her husband George Palmer Putnam.
Earhart's name became a household word (and mass marketing icon) in 1932 when she became the first woman and second person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, on the fifth anniversary of Charles Lindbergh's feat, flying a Lockheed Vega from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland to Londonderry, Ireland. That year, she received the Distinguished Flying Cross from the Congress, the Cross of Knight of the Legion of Honor from the French Government, and the Gold Medal of the National Geographic Society from President Herbert Hoover.
On January 11, 1935, Earhart became the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean from Honolulu to Oakland, California. Later that year she soloed from Los Angeles to Mexico City and back to Newark, New Jersey. In July 1936 she took delivery of a Lockheed 10E "Electra," financed by Purdue University, and started planning her round-the-world flight.
Earhart's flight would not be the first to circle the globe, but it would be the longest at 29,000 miles, following an equatorial route. On March 17, 1937 she flew the first leg, from Oakland, California to Honolulu, Hawaii. As the flight resumed three days later, a tire blew on takeoff and Earhart ground-looped the plane. Severely damaged, the aircraft had to be shipped back to California for repairs, and the flight was called off. The second attempt would begin at Miami, this time to fly from West to East. Fred Noonan was an expert navigator with vast experience in both marine (he was a licensed ship's captain) and flight navigation. He had recently left Pan Am, where he helped establish the company's seaplane routes across the Pacific. When he was chosen as navigator and Earhart's companion for the World Flight, he probably hoped the resulting publicity would help him establish his own navigation school in Florida. They departed Miami on June 1, and after numerous stops in South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, they arrived at Lae, New Guinea on June 29. About 22,000 miles of the journey had been completed. The remaining 7,000 miles would all be over the Pacific Ocean.
On July 2, 1937, at midnight GMT, Earhart and Noonan took off from Lae. Their intended destination was Howland Island, a flat sliver of land 2000 meters long and 500 meters wide, 10 feet high and 2556 miles away. Their last positive position report and sighting were over the Nukumanu Islands, about 800 miles into the flight. The U.S. Coast Guard cutter USCGC Itasca was on station at Howland, assigned to communicate with Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E and guide her to the island once she arrived in the vicinity.
Through a series of misunderstandings or errors (the details of which are still controversial) the final approach to Howland using radio navigation was never accomplished, although vocal transmissions by Earhart indicated she and Noonan believed they had reached Howland's charted position (which was incorrect by about five nautical miles) over scattered clouds. After several hours of frustrating attempts at two-way communications, contact was lost, although subsequent transmissions from the downed Electra may have been received by operators across the Pacific.
An expensive and widely publicized search by the Navy and Coast Guard was organized but this yielded no physical evidence of Earhart and Noonan's fate, which has been the subject of much rumor and speculation ever since. Many researchers believe the plane ran out of fuel and Earhart and Noonan ditched at sea, however one group (the International Group for Historic Aircract Recovery) suggests they may have flown along a standard line of position, which Earhart specified in her last transmission received at Howland, to Nikumaroro (then known as Gardner) Island in what is now Kiribati, landed there and ultimately perished. TIGHAR's research has produced a range of documented, archaeological and anecdotal evidence (but no proof) supporting this theory.