Amelia Earhart may be a household name as far as early aviators go, but locally, she is an integral part of history at the Wings of Freedom Aviation Museum in Horsham.
Earhart, who mysteriously disappeared in 1937, set a world altitude record in Horsham on April 8, 1931 in a Pitcairn autogiro. Her flight record occurred at Pitcairn airfield, which later became the Willow Grove air base and is where the Wings of Freedom Aviation Museum has been situated since opening in 2004.
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Beginning in October, an expedition featuring a 16-person team of archaeologists, filmmakers and other experts will travel by boat to Nikumaroro in the central Pacific nation of Kirbati, where Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, are believed to have landed while trying to fly around the world in 1937.
The team hopes to find Earhart’s plane as part of the exploration.
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Radio signals, human bones, and 1930s-era artifacts—including anti-freckle cream—all indicate Earhart and Noonan may have died on an unplanned stop at the uninhabited island. Soon after a strong tropical storm in 2015, satellite imagery also captured a visual oddity offshore of the island that the expedition team believes could be the remnants of Earhart’s long-lost Lockheed 10-E Electra aircraft.
Earhart, who began flying in 1921, set a multitude of flight records and even broke her previous transcontinental speed record by making the same flight in 17 hours and 7 minutes in July 1933.
In 1932, became the first woman to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean with a time of 14 hours and 56 minutes. In May of that year, she was awarded the National Geographic Society’s gold medal from President Herbert Hoover. Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross.
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Docents at the Wings of Freedom Aviation Museum enjoy sharing the history of Earhart, as well as old photographs of her time flying in the region with the thousands of visitors who stop by the museum each year.