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AMELIA EARHART

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Amelia Earhart visited Rock Springs in June 1931, in a gyro-plane sponsored by Beechnut Chewing Tobacco.  A gyro-plane, or gyro-copter, has short wings and a propeller like an airplane and a rotor like a helicopter. 

Earhart, one of the most famous American women of the 20th century, was a World War I nurse, social worker and teacher of immigrant children.  She became fascinated with aviation and earned her pilot’s license in 1921.  A passenger on Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon’s 1928 flight from America to England, she was credited with being the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.  In May 1932, Earhart crossed the Atlantic on her own, establishing a new transatlantic crossing record of 13 hours, 30 minutes.  Several years later, Earhart became the first woman to successfully complete the hazardous flight from Hawaii to California. 

In June 1937, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan set out in a twin-engine Lockheed Electra in an attempt to fly around the world.  Their route took them from Florida to South America, Africa, Thailand, Singapore, Java, and Australia.  After departing New Guinea for Howland Island, contact was lost with the plane.  The United States Navy searched extensively but did not find a trace of them.  Their mysterious disappearance has raised considerable speculation throughout the years.  Some believe that President Roosevelt sent Earhart on a secret mission to spy on military facilities and that she and Noonan were captured and executed by the Japanese.  The US government’s explanation was that the plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea.  However, a 1997 search of the Republic of Kiribati’s archives revealed that, in 1940, a British colonial officer reported finding sixteen pieces of aircraft wreckage, human remains, the sole of a woman's shoe, a Benedictine bottle, a campfire and other artifacts on Gardner Island, currently called Nikumaroro.  Searches of the now uninhabited island are planned in the near future in the hope of finally answering the question of what really happened to Amelia Earhart.

The famous pilot Amelia Earhart landed at Rock Springs in 1931. Her story is
told along with flying the mail by airplane in the 1920s and 30s.