Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart grew up in Kansas with a father whose drinking kept the family moving and short of money. During the First World War she worked as a nurse's aide in a military hospital in Toronto and watched pilots training. In 1920 she took her first flight and knew at once what she wanted. She worked as a filing clerk, photographer and lorry driver to afford lessons, and bought her first aeroplane within a year.

In 1928 she was invited to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, purely as a passenger while two men flew. She accepted, but said afterwards that she had been no more than a sack of potatoes and disliked the fame it brought. Four years later, on 20 May 1932, she took off alone from Newfoundland in a red Lockheed Vega. The altimeter failed, ice built up on the wings, flames came from a cracked exhaust manifold, and after nearly fifteen hours she landed in a field near Derry in Northern Ireland, the first woman and second person to fly the Atlantic solo.

She set more records, wrote books, designed clothes, helped found an organisation for women pilots and worked as a careers adviser to women at Purdue University. In 1937, aged 39, she set out to fly around the world at the equator with the navigator Fred Noonan. On 2 July, on the leg from New Guinea to tiny Howland Island, their radio messages grew fainter and stopped. No trace of the plane has been confirmed.