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VOICE ONE:
This is Mary Tillotson.
VOICE TWO:
And this is Steve Ember with the VOA Special English programEXPLORATIONS. Today, we tell about Amelia Earhart. She was one ofAmerica’s first female pilots.
VOICE ONE:
Amelia Earhart was born in eighteen-ninety-seven in the middlewestern state of Kansas. She was not a child of her times. MostAmerican girls at the beginning of the twentieth century were taughtto sit quietly and speak softly. They were not permitted to playball or climb trees. Those activities were considered fun for boys.They were considered wrong for girls.
Amelia and her younger sister Muriel were lucky. Their parentsbelieved all children needed physical activity to grow healthy andstrong. So Amelia and Muriel were very active girls. They rodehorses. They played baseball and basketball. They went fishing withtheir father. Other parents would not let their daughters play withAmelia and Muriel.
VOICE TWO:
The Earharts lived in a number of places in America’s middle westwhen the girls were growing up. The family was living in Chicago,Illinois when Amelia completed high school in nineteen-sixteen.
Amelia then prepared to enter auniversity. During a holiday, she visited her sister in Toronto,Canada. World War One had begun by then. And Amelia was shocked bythe number of wounded soldiers sent home from the fighting inFrance. She decided she would be more useful as a nurse than as astudent. So she joined the Red Cross.
VOICE ONE:
Amelia Earhart first became interested in flying while living inToronto. She talked with many pilots who were treated at thesoldiers’ hospital. She also spent time watching planes at a nearbymilitary airfield. Flying seemed exciting. But the machinery – theplane itself – was exciting, too.
After World War One ended, Amelia spent a year recovering fromthe disease pneumonia. She read poetry and went on long walks. Shelearned to play the banjo. And she went to school to learn aboutengines.
When she was healthy again, she entered Columbia University inNew York City. She studied medicine. After a year she went toCalifornia to visit her parents. During that trip, she took herfirst ride in an airplane. And when the plane landed, Amelia Earharthad a new goal in life. She would learn to fly.
VOICE TWO:
One of the world’s first female pilots, Neta Snook, taught Ameliato fly. It did not take long for Amelia to make her first flight byherself. She received her official pilot’s license innineteen-twenty. Then she wanted a plane of her own. She earned mostof the money to buy it by working for a telephone company. Her firstplane had two sets of wings, a bi-plane.
On June seventeenth, nineteen-twenty-eight, the plane left theeastern province of Newfoundland, Canada. The pilot and engineexpert were men. The passenger was Amelia Earhart. The planed landedin Wales twenty hours and forty minutes later. For the first time, awoman had crossed the Atlantic Ocean by air.
VOICE ONE:
Amelia did not feel very important, because she had not flown theplane. Yet the public did not care. People on both sides of theAtlantic were excited by the tall brave girl with short hair andgray eyes. They organized parties and parades in her honor.Suddenly, she was famous.
Amelia Earhart had become the first lady of the air. She wrote abook about the flight. She made speeches about flying. And shecontinued to fly by herself across the United States and back.
VOICE TWO:
Flying was a new and exciting activity in the earlynineteen-twenties. Pilots tested and demonstrated their skills inair shows. Amelia soon began taking part in these shows. She crashedone time in a field of cabbage plants. The accident did not stop herfrom flying. But she said it did decrease her desire to eatcabbages!
Flying was fun, but costly. Amelia could not continue. She soldher bi-plane, bought a car and left California. She moved across thecountry to the city of Boston, Massachusetts. She taught English toimmigrants and then became a social worker.
VOICE ONE:
In the last years of the nineteen-twenties, hundreds of recordflights were made. A few were made by women. But no woman had flownacross the Atlantic Ocean.
A wealthy American woman, Amy Guest, bought a plane to do this.However, her family opposed the idea. So she looked for anotherwoman to take her place. Friends proposed Amelia Earhart.
VOICE TWO:
American publisher George Putnam had helped organize the AtlanticOcean flight that made Amelia famous. Afterwards, he continued tosupport her flying activities. In nineteen-thirty-one, George andAmelia were married. He helped provide financial support for herrecord flights.
On May twentieth, nineteen-thirty-two, Amelia took off fromNewfoundland. She headed east in a small red and gold plane. Ameliahad problems with ice on the wings, fog from the ocean andinstruments that failed. At one point, her plane dropped suddenlynine-hundred meters. She regained control. And after fifteen hoursshe landed in Ireland.
She had become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Oceanalone.
VOICE ONE:
In the next few years, Amelia Earhart set more records andreceived more honors. She was the first to fly from Hawaii toCalifornia alone. She was the first to fly from Mexico City to NewYork City without stopping.
Amelia hoped her flights would prove that flying was safe foreveryone. She hoped women would have jobs at every level of theindustry when flying became a common form of transportation.
VOICE TWO:
In nineteen-thirty-five, the president of Purdue University inIndiana asked Amelia to do some work there. He wanted her to be anadviser on aircraft design and navigation. He also wanted her to bea special adviser to female students.
Purdue University provided Amelia with a new all-metal,two-engine plane. It had so many instruments she called it the”Flying Laboratory.” It was the best airplane in the world at thattime.
Amelia decided to use this plane to fly around the world. Shewanted to go around the equator. It was a distance offorty-three-thousand kilometers. No one had attempted to fly thatway before.
VOICE ONE:
Amelia’s trip was planned carefully. The goal was not to set aspeed record. The goal was to gather information. Crew members wouldstudy the effects of height and temperature on themselves and theplane. They would gather small amounts of air from the upperatmosphere. And they would examine the condition of airfieldsthroughout the world.
Amelia knew the trip would be dangerous. A few days before sheleft, she gave a small American flag to her friend JacquelineCochran, another female pilot. Amelia had carried the flag on allher major flights. Jacqueline did not want to take it until Ameliareturned from her flight around the world. “No,” Amelia told her,”you had better take it now.”
VOICE TWO:
Amelia and three male crew members were to make the flight.However, a minor accident and weather conditions forced a change inplans. So on June first, nineteen-thirty-seven, a silver LockheedElectra plane left Miami, Florida. It carried pilot Amelia Earhartand just one male crew member, navigator Fred Noonan.
Amelia and Fred headed south toward the equator. They stopped inPuerto Rico, Surinam and Brazil. They crossed the Atlantic Ocean toAfrica, where they stopped in Senegal, Chad, Sudan and Ethiopia.Then they continued on to India, Burma, Thailand, Singapore,Indonesia and Australia.
VOICE ONE:
When they reached New Guinea, they were about to begin the mostdifficult part of the trip. They would fly four-thousand kilometersto tiny Howland Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Three hours after leaving New Guinea, Amelia sent back a radiomessage. She said she was on a direct path to Howland Island. Later,Amelia’s radio signals were received by a United States Coast Guardship near the island. The messages began to warn of trouble. Fuelwas getting low. They could not find Howland Island. They could notsee any land at all.
VOICE TWO:
The radio signals got weaker and weaker. A message on the morningof July second was incomplete. Then there was silence.
American Navy ships and planes searched the area for fifteendays. They found nothing. Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan wereofficially declared “lost at sea.”
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VOICE ONE:
This Special English Program was written by Marilyn RiceChristiano. It was produced by Paul Thompson. This is MaryTillotson.
VOICE TWO:
And this is Steve Ember. Join us again next week for anotherEXPLORATIONS program on the VOICE OF AMERICA.