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Background: She was the best-know - and perhaps the greatest female aviator in American history... which is more remarkable because of the age in which she lived. Born in 1897, Amelia Mary Earhart began her flying career in 1921, at a time when few woman had careers of any can and had only won the right to vote a few years earlier.

She took her first flying lessons at the age of 24, and after 2-1/2 hours of instruction, told her teacher, "Life will be incomplete unless I own my own plane." By her 25th birthday she'd saved enough money working at her father's law firm, as a telephone company clerk and hauling gravel, to buy one. Within another year she set her first world record, becoming the first pilot to fly at 14,000 feet.

In 1928, Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean when she flew with pilot Wilmer Stultz. Ironically, she was asked to make the flight merely because she was a woman, not because of her flying talent. Charles Lindbergh had already made the first transatlantic flight in 1927, and Stultz was looking for a way of attracting attention to his flight. So he brought Earhart along ... as a passenger.

That was the first - and last - frivolous flying record she would ever set. In 1930 she set the speed record for women (181 mph); in 1932 she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic; on another flight became the first woman to fly solo across the continental United States; and in 1935 became the first pilot of either gender to fly from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland. (She also set several speed and distance records during her career.) By the mid-1930s, "Lady Lindy" was as famous as Charles Lindbergh. But her greatest flying attempt lay ahead of her. She tried to circumnavigate the globe along the equator.

She never made it.

The Final Flight: Earhart described her round-the-world flight as "the one last big trip in her." Taking off from Oakland, California, on May 21, 1937, she and her navigator, Frederick Noonan, flew more than 3/4 of the way around the world, making stops in South America, Africa, the Middle-East, Asia and the South Pacific. But when they landed in New Guinea on June 28, the most difficult part of the journey lay ahead: the 2,556-mile flight from New Guinea to Howland Island, a "tiny speck" of an island in the middle of the Pacific. It would be difficult to find, even in the best of conditions.

Monitoring the flight from Howland Island was the Coast Guard cutter Itasca. The Lady Lindy, Amelia's airplane, rolled off the runway at 10:22 a.m. on July 2. She remained in contact with the radio operator in New Guinea for seven hours, then was out of contact until well after midnight..

• Finally, at 2:45 a.m., the Itasca picked up her first radio transmission. Another short message was picked up at 3:45 a.m.: "Earhart. Overcast."
• At 4:00 a.m., the Itasca radioed back: "What is your position? Please acknowledge." There was no response.
• At 4:43 a.m., she radioed in again, but her voice was too faint to pick up anything other than "partly cloudy".
• The next signal was heard at 6:14 a.m., 15 minutes before the planes scheduled landing at Howland. She asked the Itascato take a bearing on the signal, so that Noonan could plot their position. the signal was too short and too faint to take a bearing. At 6:45 a.m., Earhard radioed a second time to ask for a bearing, but the signal again was too short.
• A more ominous message was received at 7:42 a.m.: "We must be on you but cannot see you but gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at altitude 1000 feet. Only one hour left of gas." One operator described Earhart's voice as "a quick drawl like from a rain barrel." She was lost, panicked and nearly out of fuel. She would radio two more times before 8:00 a.m., asking the Itasca to take a bearing, but each of her signals were too weak.
• Her next message was received at 8:44 a.m., a half hour past the time she predicted her fuel would run out: "We are on the line position 156-157. Will repeat message ... We are running north and south." Operators described her voice as "shrill and breathless, her words tumbling over one another." That was the last confirmed message she would broadcast.

  Then Amelia vanished

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