Amelia set the most aviation records for her time by a woman. And if there was anyone in the civilized world who didn’t know about her, the mystery of her disappearance in 1937 over the Pacific Ocean during an around the world flight soon made her the topic of enough newspapers, magazines and books to fill several libraries.
There is no mystery at all about where Amelia got her first lesson in flying. It was at old Kinner Field at Long Beach Boulevard and Tweedy Lane in nearby South Gate. The year was 1921, and the instructor was Neta Snook Southern.
Neta has said many times that Amelia, then 23 and a recent arrival after finishing college at Columbia, felt her family would take to her flying lessons more readily if the instructor was another woman. Neta said she helped convince the parents that aviation was all right. Indeed, Southern, herself only 24 at that time, became close to the young Amelia. They even double-dated on occasion, taking in films at the Pantages and driving back in an open-top Studebaker.
Southern recalled Amelia paying for those first flying lessons which cost $1 per minute of airtime with World War I Liberty Bonds.
Little did Southern realize her student would go on to become the famed female aviator who flew both the Atlantic and Pacific, both poles, and set many speed records, before being lost in the South Pacific while attempting to fly around the world.
Even after Amelia began setting records, she kept ties to aviation locally. Her plane was hangared at nearby Vail Field in what is now the City of Commerce. She was a member of several local flying clubs and knew Dorothy Ruether well.
To this day no one is sure what really happened to Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan. The most astute of aviation sleuths believe her Lockheed Electra airplane lies somewhere beneath the ocean off remote Howland Island. This is where logic places them if one follows Noonan’s own navigational charts and the last radio communications from her and Noonan.
There have been other theories, some as wild as having her captured by the Japanese and held captive in the Imperial Palace until the end of the war. But these are for the romantically inclined.
Most experts believe Noonan simply missed Howland by about 20 miles. Amelia had radioed her plane was low on gas. If they had been 5 miles closer to the island they would have had visual contact. But those 5 miles, out of the thousands Noonan logged so errorlessly during the earlier part of the trip, proved their undoing.
Experts on the Earhart saga point out she was often so busy with public appearances that she didn’t have time to practice flying. Noonan was known to drink on occasion. And Amelia had left some significant radio equipment behind, despite the advice of others.
This is not to say the flight was rash, but distance flights in the 1930s were still risky, involved some element of chance (for instance Howland wasn’t exactly where her charts said it was), and Earhart’s weakness was radio communications.
Records reveal that a Coast Guard vessel stationed off Howland picked up her last radio transmissions, but despite their best efforts to reach her on several radio frequencies, she apparently could not hear them.
So America lost its sweetheart of the air. But not the mystery surrounding her passage. That mystery has grown more with every year since its occurrence. Amelia is more than a female aviator today. She has become an aviation legend.
As a popular song penned shortly after her loss went:
"There’s a beautiful, beautiful field
far away in a land that is fair
Happy landing to you, Amelia Earhart
Farewell, first lady of the air..."