24th July: Women Aviators' Day

It's Women Aviators' Day. Amelia Earhart, the American aviation pioneer was born on this date in 1897. 10 facts about Amelia Earhart:

1. It could be said her first "flight" was at the age of about seven or eight when her uncle helped her build a ramp for a makeshift sled in the family garden. Despite a torn dress and bruised lip, she reportedly loved the sensation and exclaimed to her sister, "It's just like flying!"
2. The first time she saw an actual plane, though, a few years later at the Iowa State Fair, she wasn't that interested in it and couldn't wait to get back to the fairground. Her interest was piqued a bit more when, later still she visited a flying exhibition with a friend and one of the pilots, seeing two young women watching in a clearing, thought he'd scare them by diving at them. Amelia didn't run, however. She stood her ground as the aircraft passed close by and later said, "I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by."
3. In 1920 she visited an airfield with her father and he bought her a $10 ride in a plane that lasted just 10 minutes, but Amelia was hooked and immediately started saving up for flying lessons. Her teacher was another female aviation pioneer, Anita Snook. To get to her first lesson, Amelia had to take a bus and then walk four miles. She said to Anita on arrival, "I want to fly. Will you teach me?"
4. Amelia had a variety of careers - she was a nurse's aide in World War I, a nurse during the Spanish flu epidemic, and even started to train as a doctor but dropped out after a year. She worked as a photographer, truck driver, and stenographer to finance her flying lessons; later she became a sales representative for Kinner aircraft and wrote a column about flying for a local paper. She was also associate editor for Cosmopolitan magazine for a time. Earhart joined the faculty of Purdue University in 1935 as a visiting faculty member to counsel women on careers and as a technical advisor to the Department of Aeronautics.
5. She may not have known as a child exactly what she wanted to be when she grew up, except that it had to be something hitherto male dominated. She kept a scrapbook of cuttings about women who were successful in male-oriented fields, and chose her high school on the basis of which one had the best science program. She was described in her high school yearbook as "A.E. – the girl in brown who walks alone."
6. Her attitude to marriage was ahead of its time. She broke off one engagement, but eventually married a divorced man called George Putnam, who had to propose to her six times before she finally agreed. Earhart referred to her marriage as a "partnership" with "dual control." She refused to take her husband's name, believed them both to be breadwinners, and made it clear she was not going to be bound by any code of faithfulness; neither did she insist that he remain faithful to her.
7. After Charles Lindburgh flew solo across the Atlantic, a woman named Amy Phipps Guest decided she wanted to be the first woman to fly in a plane across the Atlantic. However, when Amy looked into it, she decided it was too dangerous for her, but was still convinced that some woman somewhere needed to do it. So she sponsored the project and suggested the team find "another girl with the right image." Already known as a journalist promoting women in aviation, and bearing some physical resemblance to Lindburgh (to the extent of being dubbed "Lady Lindy" by the press) Amelia Earhart was the obvious choice. On this first trip, she was a passenger. "I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes," she said, although she was more than just a passenger - she was writing the flight log. It took the team 20 hours and 40 minutes to fly from Newfoundland to Wales. "Maybe someday I'll try it alone," Earhart said.
8. And, of course, she did exactly that, flying from Newfoundland to Ireland in the faster time of 14 hours and 56 minutes. A local farm hand who'd seen the landing, asked her, "Have you flown far?" He probably wasn't expecting her answer - "From America."
9. While most famous for flying the Atlantic, Earhart had other aviation achievements to her name: first woman to fly solo across the North American continent and back; a world altitude record of 18,415 feet (5,613 m); the first person to fly solo from Honolulu, Hawaii to Oakland, California. She came third in the first Santa Monica-to-Cleveland Women's Air Derby. She would have won if she had not stopped to help a friend. At the final stop of the race, Earhart was in joint first place with Ruth Nicholls, but as Nicholls was taking off for the final leg, her plane hit a tractor and flipped over. Earhart ran over to the crash site to make sure her friend was not hurt before taking off herself.
10. After Earhart and her plane vanished during an attempt to fly around the world, the search operation to try and find her was the most intensive and costly ever undertaken in the US up to that point. After the official search, her husband continued to direct and finance further searches - but nothing was ever found.