Trivia

• She developed a friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, who wanted to learn how to fly. Earhart had planned to teach her, for which the First Lady even got her student permit.
• Earhart had such an impression on public that people often named babies, land, and even household pets after the aviatrix.
• Amelia was named Amelia Mary Earhart after her two grandmothers: Amelia Harres Otis and Mary Wells Earhart.
• Amelia helped to finance a fruit farm in Arizona for her former mechanic, who had contracted tuberculosis.
• After Amelia sold her first plane, "The Canary," she purchased a 1922 Kissel Goldbug automobile, which she nicknamed "Yellow Peril."
• Throughout her childhood, Amelia kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about successful women in predominantly male-oriented fields, including film direction, law, advertising, management and mechanical engineering.

Conspiracy Theories

One theory purports that Earhart, being low on fuel, began searching for Howland by flying northeast and southwest along a centerline, and landed at alternative site. Earhart conspiracy enthusiasts uncovered accounts of a plane wreck there before 1939, and have documented reports of two castaways who fit descriptions of Earhart and Noonan on the island of Nikumaroro, which was formerly known as Gardner Island. A research group recently discovered parts of a plane on that island, which could have come from Earhart's Electra.

Another, more radical theory claims that Earhart and Noonan never intended to land at Howland. Instead, they headed north to the Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands, where they were engaging in pre-war intelligence. Some say they returned to the U.S. afterward under assumed names. Still others say the duo were captured and killed in Saipan as spies.

The simplest theory is also the bleakest: that Earhart's plane, running out of fuel, landed and sank in the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers are currently investigating the waters around Howland Island in an effort to find crash debris from Earhart's plane.