Amelia Erhardt

A woman whose mysteriousness reminds me of the AirFrance crash.

The soaring legacy of Amelia Earhart
LA Times-Washington Post Posted online: Sunday , May 31, 2009 at 2318 hrs
There’s something about Amelia Earhart. More than seven decades after she disappeared without a trace in the South Pacific on her flight around the world, Earhart remains the most famous female aviator in history, a timeless heroine and inspiration to generations of women, filmmakers and fashionistas.
Flying was just the beginning. Earhart was also a fashion icon and designer with her close-cropped hair, pants and leather jackets. She was a leader in women’s rights and the peace movement. She was a president and founding member of the Ninety-Nines—the original women’s pilot organisation. She was a pioneering businesswoman—a partner in both Transcontinental Air Transport and Ludington Airlines and a luggage designer—a wife (she was married to publisher George Putnam) and a writer.

“She definitely has a legacy,” said Dorothy Cochrane, the curator overseeing Earhart’s fire engine red Lockheed Vega, in which she flew solo across the Atlantic in 1932 and which is housed at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Cochrane expects Earhart’s legacy to soar even higher with the release of the family comedy, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, featuring Amy Adams as Earhart.

Amelia, directed by Mira Nair and starring Hilary Swank, is a more serious look at her life, based on three recent biographies. Richard Gere plays Putnam, who also worked to publicise his famous wife’s exploits and image. Earhart, who turned down Putnam six times before she agreed to marry him, referred to their marriage as a “partnership” with “dual control”. The film will be released in the autumn.

Although Earhart has been the subject of countless books and several documentaries, very few films have been made about her. Rosalind Russell played an Earhart-esque flier in 1943’s Flight for Freedom; Susan Clark tackled the role in a 1976 TV movie, Amelia Earhart; and Diane Keaton starred in the 1994 TNT movie Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight.

So why is Hollywood taking notice of Earhart now? Nair believes it’s because Earhart “was the complete beacon of inspiration in the Depression for this country”. “It’s sort of an incredible coincidence that we are in this slump,” she adds. “I think it’s an excellent time to remind people of the heroes that kept us afloat—more than afloat—in Amelia’s time.”

Made in cooperation with the Smithsonian and partially shot there, Battle of the Smithsonian finds Larry (Ben Stiller) travelling to the site after pieces at the Museum of Natural History in New York are moved to storage underneath the largest museum complex in the world, in Washington. When the evil Pharaoh Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria) comes to life, he decides to take over the world. Larry heads off to the Smithsonian to help out his friends, who are being threatened by the pharaoh. Helping Larry in his quest is Earhart.

Earhart gained national attention in 1928 when she was the first female passenger on the Fokker Friendship, which successfully flew across the Atlantic. She made her own nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic 77 years ago this month. Earhart also accomplished the first solo transcontinental flight by a woman in 1932 and in 1935 made the first solo flight by anyone from Hawaii to the US mainland. Her disappearance—along with navigator Fred Noonan—on July 2, 1937, added to her mystique.

Some believe that she and Noonan crash-landed on uninhabited Gardner Island and perished; during World War II, it was thought that she might have been spying on the Japanese for Roosevelt—that was the theme of Flight for Freedom—and another theory posits that she and Noonan were captured and later executed by the Japanese when their plane crashed on Saipan Island.