This Day in History: Amelia Earhart's solo transatlantic flight

On this day in 1932, Amelia Earhart receives a Distinguished Flying Cross. She’d just become the first female—and the second person ever—to make a solo, non-stop transatlantic crossing via airplane.

The talented aviator was already well-known. Four years earlier, she’d earned national attention when she became the first female to fly across the Atlantic.  On that occasion, however, she’d been a passenger traveling with two men.

Now she would do it on her own, reportedly declaring that “there’s more to life than being a passenger.”

Amelia prepared for her trip in secret, so that no other female aviator would try to beat her to the punch. She planned to depart on May 20, 1932: Five years, to the day, since Charles Lindbergh’s record-setting flight.

Amelia Earhart receives her Distinguished Flying Cross from Vice President Charles Curtis (left). The California Governor James Rolph (right) looks on.

Her plan was simple. She and her mechanic would hop into the back of her Lockheed Vega, out of sight of the media, while her adviser and fellow pilot Bernt Balchen flew it to Newfoundland. Amelia would then begin a trip across the Atlantic, alone.

Balchen described Amelia’s final moments before take-off.

“She looks at me with a small lonely smile,” he wrote in his diary, “and says, ‘Do you think I can make it?’ and I grin back: ‘You bet.’ She crawls calmly into the cockpit of the big empty airplane . . . . We pull the chocks, and she is off . . . . ”

It wasn’t long before Amelia ran into trouble. Just a few hours in, her altimeter quit working. “In all her experience of flying,” Earhart biographer Mary S. Lovell writes, “she had never had this happen before and [her husband] George later wrote that her reaction was one of awe rather than horror.”

An unexpected thunderstorm presented the next challenge, but getting tossed around would not be Amelia’s biggest problem. “The manifold on her engine broke,” Doris Rich, another biographer, explains, “and the flames from the backfire from it were coming out.”

Would more problems arise?  Should she turn back? No, she decided.

Later, Amelia was climbing to a higher altitude to get around clouds when her Vega spun out of control due to an accumulation of ice. “How long we spun I do not know,” she later said. “I do know that I did my best to do exactly what one should do with a spinning plane and regained flying control as the warmth of the lower altitude melted the ice.”

The rest of the night proved difficult, and George would later tell reporters that “it was absolutely black, and she flew blind.” At various points “she flew right on top of the water” because “she’d rather drown than burn up.” Yet there was more bad news when dawn broke: She had a gas leak! She’d intended to fly the whole way to France, but now that wouldn’t work.

Instead, Amelia touched down in a pasture near Londonderry, Ireland, as an astonished farm hand watched. “Have you flown far?” he asked. “From America,” she replied.

Amelia found a phone and reported her success to reporters in London. She’d completed the trip in less than 15 hours.

“I’m not a bit hurt and I think the plane is all right,” she said. “I had trouble with my exhaust manifold . . . . for a lot of the way I was flying through storms—mist, rain, and a little fog. . . . I’m a bit deaf after the terrible roar of the engines in my ears all the time, but at any rate I’ve done it.”

Naturally, the daring stunt made Amelia even more beloved than she was before. As a civilian, she wasn’t technically eligible for a Distinguished Flying Cross, but Congress approved the award anyway.

“I did this just for fun,” Amelia concluded. “I have always wanted to do the flight myself and my husband is a good sport. He does not interfere with my flying and I don’t interfere with his affairs.”

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Primary Sources:

• Amelia Earhart (PBS; May 7, 2019) (transcript of program HERE)

• Amelia Earhart Departs on Solo Flight Across Atlantic, May 20, 1932 (video)

• Amelia Earhart's Distinguished Flying Cross Award Card (National Archives website)

• Amelia Earhart Departs Solo Flight Across Atlantic May 20 1932 (National Air and Space Museum website)

• Amelia Earhart, DO-X Complete Sea Flights: First Woman to Hop Over Ocean Alone (Grand Forks Herald; May 22, 1932) (p. 1)

• Amelia Earhart Solos the Atlantic (National Air and Space Museum website)

• Amelia Telephones News of Arrival (Philadelphia Inquirer; May 22, 1932) (p. 16)

• First Lone Atlantic Flight by Woman (Evening Sentinel; May 21, 1932) (p. 1)

• ‘Hope It’s Not Habit’ Says Husband of Amelia Earhart (Arizona Daily Star; May 22, 1932) (p. 1)

• Karen Bush Gibson, Women Aviators: 26 Stories of Pioneer Flights, Daring Missions, and Record-setting Journeys (2013)

• Karen Karbo, How Amelia Earhart navigated the skies and society (National Geographic; January 25, 2019)

• ‘Lady Lindy’ Scion of Phila. Quakers (Philadelphia Inquirer; May 22, 1932) (p. 16)

• Mary S. Lovell, The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia Earhart (1989)

• Spencer Howard, Amelia Earhart and the Distinguished Flying Cross (Hoover Heads: Herbert Hoover Library and Museum blog; August 24, 2022)

• “There’s More to Life Than Being a Passenger:” Amelia Earhart’s Transatlantic Flight (State Library of Ohio: Ohio Memory; May 21, 2021)