Amelia Earhart was born in 1897, in Kansas. There weren’t many planes at that time because they were something new. Amelia didn’t like the first plane that she saw at a flying show: she thought it was something very boring sitting there on the ground. But Amelia soon changed her opinion. In 1920, she took her first flight and loved every minute of it.

In those days women didn’t do a lot of things that they can do today. Flying was one of those things. But Amelia decided that flying would be more than a dream. In 1921, she took flying lessons and soon got her pilot’s licence.

Now she could fly but she wanted to do more. So she started to do things that no other woman had done. She saved all her money and bought an old plane that she called the ‘Canary’. Then she made her first record by flying higher than any other woman – 14,000 feet.

Soon after that two people asked her if she would fly with them as a passenger across the Atlantic to Britain. This would make her the first woman to do this journey. In 1928, the three people left America and 21 hours later they arrived in Britain – today this journey takes about 7 hours.

Four years later she flew across the Atlantic alone: the first woman to do the journey and only the second person in the world, too. Amelia became an American legend and showed everyone that women could do anything they wanted to.

Her last flight was in 1937. As she was trying to fly around the world, the plane disappeared.