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Who Was Amelia Earhart? · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:06
  Alex: Hello to everybody.
• 0:06
  Alex: Classic. Welcome to another episode of dirt nap city.
• 0:14
  Alex: podcast about interesting dead people. I'm Alex, I'm here with my friend Kelly. What's going on, Kelly?
• 0:24
  Kelly: Man? I'm just enjoying all this beautiful weather we've had recently. And we're actually having a garage sale this weekend. That's kind of a big deal. Haven't done one in a couple years. Like to purge some stuff out of the garage. Do you ever have garage sales?
• 0:40
  Alex: No, we have the opposite of a garage sale. We look like we've purchased 10 garage sales in our house. Oh,
• 0:46
  Kelly: so you go to garage sales and buy people's stuff? No, we don't. But it looks like we do.
• 0:50
  Kelly: I was looking for 100 disc CD changer. Do you have one of those?
• 0:54
  Alex: I actually do. I'll give it
• 0:56
  Kelly: to you close to how close to it? Are
• 0:57
  Alex: you? Um, well, 15 feet away. But how much would you charge for something like that?
• 1:02
  Kelly: Dude, here's the thing.
• 1:02
  Kelly: For me, personally, I look at it as somebody's paying me to haul away my junk, right stuff that I don't need and freeing up space in my house or my garage or my office or whatever. And so I'm, I'm very, very negotiable and cheap on garage sale stuff.
• 1:19
  Kelly: Whereas other people I grasa with tend to think of what they paid for it originally and base their price on that. But, dude, if you come to me, especially if you come later in the day, like first right out of the gate, like let's say I have a let's say I have a 720 P television, right? It's a flat screen, but it's an older flat screen. And I'm asking 20 bucks for it. You know, that's, that's not bad.
• 1:42
  Kelly: Somebody comes in and ask me offers me two bucks for it. I'm gonna say no, but what I'll say is, especially if it's early in the morning, I'm gonna say come back at noon. And if it's still here, you can have it.
• 1:54
  Alex: Yeah, you know, if I just could I just take a tour through your house and just grab stuff.
• 1:58
  Alex: And by that too, is everything for sale or just the stuff on the one. It's,
• 2:05
  Kelly: it's called a garage sale. stuff in the garage or in front of the garage. Okay. But we we've definitely, we've definitely, like cleared the house of some stuff. It's not 100%. But that's what I'm doing this weekend. And I hope the weather holds out. All right.
• 2:23
  Alex: Well, good for you. I hope I hope it works out. I hope you make 10s of dollars.
• 2:28
  Kelly: I think I'll probably hand out dirt nap city stickers to everybody to get an idea.
• 2:31
  Kelly: Like, yeah, just here you go.
• 2:36
  Alex: Today's subject was actually somebody that I did get as a request from your son.
• 2:39
  Alex: Andrew interesting is already on my list of people to do but maybe he bumped it up a little.
• 2:51
  Alex: And it's the person who when I asked Chet GPT who we should do always comes up in the top five of people that they that it suggests. Okay,
• 3:05
  Kelly: okay, is the politician or what's his what's his lane?
• 3:10
  Alex: Well, you made one fatal assumption there when you said he, what's her lane? Okay. She is a 20th century icon. As you know, I like the 20th century 20th century icon born in 1897, so just just miss being born in the 20th century. Born in 1897.
• 3:35
  Alex: Atchison, Kansas.
• 3:37
  Kelly: All right. 1897. So she must have been maybe what year did she die?
• 3:51
  Alex: She died in 1937. We think
• 3:57
  Kelly: Oh, are we talking about Amelia Earhart, we are
• 4:00
  Alex: we are talking about Earhart, do you know much about a? Yeah, a little bit? Well, very interesting woman. Like I said 20th century icon probably at one point, maybe one of the most famous people in the United States. Shades of babe teacher sends a hilarious is just being kind of a feminist icon. A woman that people looked up to as somebody that could do things just as well as men and just kind of an overall badass at the time. Have you seen the movie that that's that just came out called Nyad. And I've never even heard it. It's about Diana Nyad the woman who swim the the flamingos channel know from Florida to the Bahamas.
• 4:49
  Kelly: What? I don't know anything about this. Yeah, there's a movie out right now.
• 4:52
  Kelly: Like in theaters or on streaming services. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 4:57
  Alex: sure. It's up for Academy Awards this year. Anyways, her story kind of reminds me of Amelia Earhart just has this goal and just keeps kind of trying to trying to get it and I'd recommend that movie if you're interested interested in that type of thing. Awesome. So Amelia Earhart, like I said, was born in 1897. And she was raised kind of as a, what they call back then tomboys we don't hear that term that much anymore, but
• 5:28
  Kelly: it's kind of a dead end.
• 5:28
  Kelly: Yeah.
• 5:31
  Alex: Maybe we should do that one day on on our dead ends series but she was raised to not be just a nice little girl and be adventurous. You know, doing things like setting up setting up ramps on her roof, you know, and taking a sled and flying off of it, you know, just very adventurous person. And, but beyond that kind of a relatively didn't, didn't do a lot of notable things in her in her childhood. But in 1917, during Christmas vacation, she visited her sister in Toronto, World War One was going on, and she saw soldiers coming back from World War One. And so she volunteered with the Red Cross Red Cross.
• 6:18
  Kelly: Don't tell me she was an ambulance driver.
• 6:19
  Alex: She was not she was a nurse's aide. Okay, ambulance driver seems to be kind of the the backdoor into dirt nap city?
• 6:27
  Alex: Yes. But she worked as a nurse's aide in a hospital and she would hear the stories about PILOTs about flying in World War One.
• 6:37
  Alex: And now remember, just to give you a little context here, the Wright Brothers first flight was like 1903. Three. Exactly, yeah.
• 6:48
  Alex: So you know, this was 1917. So this would be kind of the equivalent of today talking about, like, smartphones, you know,
• 7:01
  Kelly: they had been around for a little while, but still nice.
• 7:04
  Kelly: Very,
• 7:05
  Alex: very new. And here where there was a war and people were flying in, in the war, right.
• 7:07
  Alex: But commercial flight wasn't that common or anything. And flying was really, really new.
• 7:16
  Alex: Like I said, 15 it was only 13 years earlier, 14 years earlier, were the first people ever, ever flew. So that's that's a big, big jump from from where we were. So this was a new thing.
• 7:32
  Alex: So she would hear these stories about these different war pilots. Well, like I said, she worked in this hospital. Well, the next year 1918. You know what happened in 1918? Was the pandemic. Oh, really? Okay.
• 7:46
  Alex: Yeah. And she got it. She got it. She was one of the first people to get that Spanish flu.
• 7:55
  Alex: And she got it pretty bad. She had bad headaches, and she was laid up for like a year. And then throughout her life, she kind of had these sinus issues that every now and then she'd have to go get get surgery on or taking care of. But she was she was laid up for about a year when she came out of that she was she couldn't shake that that thing about, you know, going to she wanted to go to an air show.
• 8:21
  Alex: So father took her to an air show in Long Beach. Long Beach where we I think we had talked about Howard Hughes. Yeah,
• 8:32
  Kelly: that's where he taxied and share briefly lifted off the Spruce Goose for excuse to Hercules, as it was actually known, right. You got man, I
• 8:40
  Alex: think when they call it the Spruce Goose before, but I was
• 8:43
  Kelly: channeling Howard Hughes.
• 8:46
  Alex: So she went to this air show 1920 And the next day, she convinced her dad to pay for her to do a passenger flight. Now back then passenger flights were really uncommon. And it's kind of like probably like going skydiving today. Right? So she paid $10 for 10 minutes. That's about the equivalent of about 160 bucks today. So $10 for 10 minutes, this guy would take her up in the in the plane, and she was hooked. She wanted to do more and more and more. She begged her parents to like she was a grown woman but still they she didn't have any money. I guess they did have a little bit of money but they weren't poor.
• 9:32
  Alex: But she where did they live wherever she wherever she from?
• 9:35
  Alex: Well, she grew up in in Kansas, Kansas and Iowa and spent a lot of time in Iowa at this time they were in California. And the deal with her parents was they that she could fly. Or she could learn how to fly but only a woman could teach her how to fly. So she found this woman named Anita hooks at The Cool name her her or her nickname was smokey.
• 10:04
  Kelly: That's even cooler.
• 10:06
  Alex: Free Jersey shores lucky.
• 10:06
  Alex: In fact, Smokey was about the same age as Amelia. But she lived until 1991. Wow. So she was older, she lived to be an old woman of 96. And she wrote a book actually called, I taught Amelia to fly. And the deal, the initial deal, there was 500 bucks for 12 hours as an instructor, but they ended up throwing a lot of they ended up becoming friends. So she gave her a lot of free lessons. She saved about $1,000 doing different odd jobs and paid Snooki a lot of this money, and she took her first lesson in January of 9021. And it wasn't easy, even getting to the airfield. She'd have to take a bus and then walk for miles, just to get to the airport every day to do this. But she was hooked. Like I said, six months later, she bought her first plane. You know, like, like a lot of these stories, these 20th century stories we tell it's like somebody try something. And then six months later, they're the head of something or they're doing their Yeah, flags or they're famous or something.
• 11:17
  Alex: Yes, don't work that swiftly these days. But six months later, she bought a plane that was a bright yellow biplane that she called the canary. And by October 2022, so she her first lesson was January 21. By October of 2022, she flew to 14,000 feet, which is was a world record for women. But this was a time where not many women were doing this
• 11:42
  Kelly: and there was no canopy, right? I mean, this is an open open biplane. She
• 11:47
  Alex: was the 16th woman in the US to be issued a pilot's license. So pretty much every time she goes on the air she sent in some kind of record, and not just record for women, but sometimes, you know, doing things that a lot of people hadn't done just because you know, this flying had been around for 20 years. So she got a little notoriety by by doing things like that, breaking these altitude records and like you said, there was probably no canopy, so going high was probably couldn't go to 60,000 feet if you wanted to, you know, it was just not pressurized or anything like that. Well in 1927 That was when Charles Lindbergh flew did his solo flight across the Atlantic. And that was you know, that captivated the US and and then they were gonna have a woman do that next well, actually, the idea was to not have a woman fly solo across the Atlantic but just be flown across the Atlantic. And this woman, Amy guest was going to do it and she got it got cold feet.
• 12:58
  Alex: And she said, I'm not going to do this. But we got to find the right woman with the right image to do this. You mean be flown as in be a passenger? Yes. So that's exactly what happened in 1928. Two guys, Wilmer salts and Louis Gordon flew from Newfoundland to Wales. And that's kind of the shortest distance between US and Britain crossed the Atlantic right Newfoundland, okay, as far east as you can get North America and Wales is pretty far west. So. So those two guys and with Amelia Earhart as a passenger, and in her words, she was like baggage, like a sack of potatoes. She wasn't happy with this, but they did. And if you go to Wales, there's a plaque that says that Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly across the the Atlantic, which is true, she did flew, but she didn't do any of the piloting. She just rode like a sack of potatoes. How long do you think that flight took from Newfoundland to Wales in 1928?
• 13:58
  Kelly: Let's see, it's probably about so I'm gonna say 16 hours,
• 14:07
  Alex: 20 hours and 40 minutes.
• 14:07
  Alex: Okay. I think that flight nowadays, maybe like six hours or something? Yeah. But she was even though she wasn't happy and she thought she was a sack of potatoes. She was treated like a hero. When she came back, they had a ticker tape parade. She got to meet the President President Coolidge at the time.
• 14:31
  Alex: And while she was in, I guess, she she flew from Wales. Then she flew on to England. And while she was there, she bought a plane owned by an Irish pilot, a woman pilot named Mary Heath, who was the first bridge pilot, and she had that plane shipped back to the US. So she was acquiring planes. She was just all all in and she had big ideas. As for the future, but you know, she kind of looked like Charles Lindbergh and he was called Lucky Lindy. I don't know if you knew that was his nickname. And then I have heard that Yes. And she was they call her lady Lindy. Just a little insulting, I think so yeah. She was kind of always in his shadow. You know, they, they also called her Queen of the air, which is, I think, much cooler name, Queen of the air.
• 15:23
  Alex: And the other thing she started doing was promoting products.
• 15:26
  Alex: The advertising executives really saw something in her. She started doing ads for things like Lucky Strike cigarettes, of course. But actually, that call actually cost her. I think she was supposed to do a magazine spread with McCall's and they cancelled it after they saw the Lucky Strike ad but they wanted a certain image and but she started selling a women's clothing line at Macy. She had her own kind of wrinkle proof washable clothing line. And it was really important to her that like the that both women all over the US started dressing like her and honorable shoes.
• 16:08
  Alex: Yeah, yeah, she was. Like I said she was kind of a badass at the time. She was also the luggage.
• 16:18
  Alex: There was a luggage line, which totally makes sense, right?
• 16:21
  Kelly: But she was she was an early social media influencer.
• 16:25
  Alex: I wouldn't say social media. But sure. I mean, she became the Associate Editor editor at cosmopolitan. I mean, she was a woman that people were like, yeah, why not? She worked for TWA, the early versions of TWA to promote air travel. And while they were doing this, you know, they were getting commercial air travel off the ground. So she, they were afraid that women would be afraid to do this. So she would she worked at TWA tried to promote women's travel.
• 16:56
  Kelly: It's as easy as being a sack of potatoes.
• 16:59
  Alex: Maybe I don't know if that was that was their first
• 17:02
  Kelly: advertising line and Bad, bad, bad.
• 17:05
  Alex: But I'm sure there was a lot of I mean, I'm not sure if I was running the 1920s. If I would have been all in on commercial air travel, I guess
• 17:14
  Kelly: it would almost be like today. If you had the opportunity if you know if money weren't a problem, would you go up into space?
• 17:22
  Alex: Are you asking me? Yeah, probably not.
• 17:26
  Kelly: Okay, then you probably wouldn't have flown on a plane back back then. I'm not
• 17:29
  Alex: sure it was. It's that similar? Because there. I mean, only like billionaires can do that now.
• 17:36
  Kelly: Or I just said if money were no object. Oh, right.
• 17:38
  Kelly: Right, right. But
• 17:39
  Alex: I think this was like TWA was trying to get rich. But not that rich.
• 17:46
  Kelly: But you said you said the the barrier was going to be fear. Right. And that was part of what she was trying to do was say it's safe. It's safer than driving your car. It's safer than this. It's safer than that.
• 17:53
  Kelly: You know, it's I don't know, I think I would feel more more safe going up into space than I would going down into like an explorer submarine. You know, with that catastrophe?
• 18:07
  Alex: I might, I might compare it more tour to like getting in a driverless car today. Like, you know, in some cities, you know, like, I think Phoenix has Ubers Yeah, driver.
• 18:18
  Kelly: Yeah. My daughter's My daughter has been in one she she said it was pretty good experience.
• 18:23
  Alex: Yeah. So I think that's more they're trying to adopt this where everybody's going to do it in a couple of decades.
• 18:29
  Alex: But the first adopters are are going to be the ones that really have to, you know, tackle that.
• 18:33
  Alex: That? That fear so yeah.
• 18:38
  Kelly: So so, so easy a sack of potatoes can do it is not how they did it. That was when when
• 18:43
  Alex: your daughter did that?
• 18:43
  Alex: Was it cheap, or was it expensive? Or was it the same as a regular? She'd do it like Uber.
• 18:51
  Kelly: I know she's she's at school in Arizona in Phoenix and she said there's I forget the name of it. It's a it's a it's a different brand name. It's not Uber it's got another brand name that that they that they have for these driverless cars that will take you places it's like an Uber, but there's no driver.
• 19:10
  Alex: And it rides on regular roads and freeways. Yeah, we
• 19:13
  Kelly: saw. I've been out there a couple of times, and I've seen them driving around. Man. It's weird. It's weird. It's weird to see a car go by with no no driver. And
• 19:24
  Alex: yeah, that is strange. But that's probably what it was like, because I mean, looking, looking back. I mean, it was just natural that that was going to happen, but that we didn't have the first people doing that. So anyways, 1928 she becomes the first woman to fly solo across North America and back and back. So she flew coast to coast and back, New York to LA or I don't know exactly what cities it was, but basically, you know, coast to coast and back in 1931. She said another world altitude record of 18,004 100 feet. I'm not sure if there was a canopy with what the situation was at that point, but, you know, we're getting higher and higher here. And in 1932, she was going to fly from Newfoundland to Paris. She actually landed in Northern Ireland in a farmer's yard. And he said, wow, have you come far?
• 20:24
  Alex: And she said, Yeah, from America. That was a big deal, though. 48 hours and 56 minutes.
• 20:34
  Alex: So she's, you know, just in a few years, you see how, how that time has really shaped five hours. For that time, she became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt pass the subject of dirt nap city. Eleanor Roosevelt, she actually convinced Eleanor Roosevelt to take up flying. She never got past a student permit.
• 20:56
  Alex: She never was able to fly by herself. She quit. But they became good friends. And that was kind of all the rage back then was to be like, Amelia Earhart. Well, in 1935. So now she's, what 38 years old. She flew, she became the first ever to fly solo from Honolulu to Oakland. Okay, oh, wow. That's a long ways, right? That is a long way. If you look at a map, if you look on a globe or a map, and you see where Hawaii is, it's just a little speck in the middle of the ocean, right? Just between just between, you know, the US and Australia, you can't even really see it on a globe.
• 21:38
  Alex: It's so what's
• 21:41
  Kelly: what's amazing, even beyond just the actual piloting, because I would imagine that was probably pretty monotonous. Once you're up in the air, you know, you just kind of holding the stick and making sure you stay at an altitude. It's the navigation, right? Because they didn't have GPS, they didn't have computers, they didn't have enough anything. You know, they're they're navigating by charts. And just real quick.
• 22:03
  Kelly: I've been watching the show on Apple, Apple, you know, it's an apple original called masters of the air. Have you heard of that?
• 22:12
  Kelly: I have. It's, it's Tom Hanks is one of the executive producers.
• 22:16
  Kelly: And it's about World War two pilots who flew the Flying Fortress, they call him the forts. And it's a great show. If you like aviation, it's it's kind of being compared to band being compared to Band of Brothers. I don't think it's as good as Band of Brothers because Band of Brothers was amazing.
• 22:35
  Kelly: But it is a really interesting take. And they do focus a lot on the navigators and how what a tough job they had. I mean, imagine you've got all these maps, you've got all these plot points that you're plotting, you're looking at stars, you're looking at the sun, and you're being shot at you're being shook around, then it's cold. As a matter of fact, one of the pilots in one of the episodes gets frostbite pretty severe frostbite, because he has to take his coat off because he's been shot and, you know, anyway, it's it's a, if you like aviation masters of the air, Apple. Good show. And
• 23:09
  Alex: this was 10 years before that, you know? 10 Yeah,
• 23:12
  Kelly: yeah. So the navigation was even rougher. Yeah,
• 23:14
  Alex: yeah. She also was able to fly from solo from LA to Mexico City, and Mexico City to New York. So basically, every time she's getting on a plane, she's setting a record big on these long distance flights and getting really good at it. Some of these she was, I think, the one from Mexico City in New York. She said the last couple hours were so relaxing. She turned on the radio and just listened to the New York Philharmonic on the way and it was so it was so relaxing, so I don't know if that was braggadocio but she was just really like loving this stuff.
• 23:47
  Alex: But her goal was to fly around the world others had done this other people had actually circumnavigated the globe but the way she wanted to do it would have been the longest because she wanted to basically follow the equator at the at the at the Okay, why this points of they're not exactly follow the equator but pretty much follow it as close as possible. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, if you think of a globe you could fly around the world at the very top and it's not very you could walk around the world at the very top it but the wider you get the harder it becomes. And there's long stretches of ocean too that you have to have to navigate also Yeah. So she was able to get the funding she was a visiting professor at Purdue on just not about anything. I don't remember what what she exactly was a professor in but she was able to, to get produced financing to the Lockheed build the plane and then Purdue pay for it. And she chose this guy named Harry Manning as her navigator. And it was just gonna be the two of them. And he wasn't. He was I think he was a ship navigator. And she had actually been the navigator on one of the ships that she took back when she flew a plane across the Atlantic. And then they went on some test runs. And it turns out like, every time they went, he like be off by a little bit, like by like, 20 miles or something. And she's like,
• 25:29
  Kelly: Yeah, and again, that's just shows how important the navigator is. Right?
• 25:33
  Alex: She's like, he's not a great navigator, but he knows Morse code better than anybody.
• 25:35
  Alex: So she brought in this other guy named Fred Noonan, and he was he trained Pan Am pilots, you know, commercial airline Air flight was starting to take off. So she figured with Noonan as the navigator and Harry Manning is the guy who would do Morse code that would work out so the plan was to use Noonan for the first leg from Hawaii to this place called Howland Island. Howland Island is this tiny, tiny, tiny island. But you know, when I say fly around the world understand that this isn't on one tank of gas, constantly shopping and read. Yeah, constantly stuff.
• 26:16
  Alex: Howard
• 26:18
  Kelly: Hughes had said he had set a world record for going around the world, but he had to stop many times. Oh, yeah. But he didn't do it at the equator.
• 26:27
  Alex: Right. So there's this place called Holland Island.
• 26:30
  Alex: It's a shiny like, basically a landing strip. And she was gonna fly it out Howland Island from there, that's a long stretch.
• 26:37
  Alex: That's like a couple of 1000 miles from Hawaii to Howland Island. Then she was going to use Harry Manning to go from there to Australia. And then she was going to do the rest by herself.
• 26:48
  Kelly: So those guys who just parachute out. Thanks, guys.
• 26:52
  Kelly: Yeah,
• 26:52
  Alex: they took a ship back from Australia or whatever, wherever.
• 26:55
  Alex: Oh,
• 26:55
  Kelly: you mean literally. They weren't going to go on with her.
• 26:57
  Kelly: They were just going to help her get from Hawaii to Australia.
• 27:00
  Kelly: Yeah. Because
• 27:01
  Alex: the tough part was that stretch there. I guess the navigation was really tough. And you have to hit this island.
• 27:07
  Kelly: Yeah, there's no there's no points of reference in the ocean. It's just yeah, the ocean. And
• 27:11
  Alex: she wasn't a navigator.
• 27:11
  Alex: And she didn't know Morse code.
• 27:15
  Alex: That Well, I don't know. So, March 1937. She takes off she goes from Oakland to Honolulu.
• 27:19
  Alex: And it's Amelia Harry Manning, Fred Noonan. And then she brought along this guy who was a stuntman to in Hollywood, who was her technical adviser. His name was Paul Manse. So they go to Hawaii, they get from Oakland to Hawaii. And they get to Hawaii and the propeller was all jacked up. And they tried to go on to the next that Holland island. But before they took off, the tire blew, landing gear collapsed. And they had to cancel the rest of the trip. And Harry Manning's
• 27:52
  Kelly: a Lockheed plane this night by Lockheed,
• 27:55
  Alex: Harry Manning, the the so called navigator, the original navigator, he says I'm out. I'm not doing this again. You're on your own, if you want to try this again. So he's out. And so that was in March of 1937. By June, they were ready to try it again. But this time, they decided to not make a big deal about it not tell a bunch of people because you know, if you don't make it, everyone's disappointed. So they go from Oakland to Miami. So now you're going the other way, right? You go from Oakland to Miami. And then it was just Amelia and Fred Noonan. And then from there, they went from Miami to South America. And then they went to Africa. And then they went to India and then they went to Southeast Asia. By now people are knowing that they're they're going to do this. But they I think once they got to Miami, they said Alright, where are our plan is to go around the world.
• 28:51
  Alex: So they're there in New Guinea.
• 28:54
  Alex: Papa New Guinea on June 29.
• 28:54
  Alex: Right, so it took almost a month to get there. They had 22,000 miles down 7000 to go. But that was the longest stretch of the trip. You had to go from New Guinea to that Howland Island.
• 29:07
  Alex: And then Howland Island to Honolulu and then on to Oakland, but they had already done that part in reverse. So basically the park that they had to go was practically the park they had already done and reverse. It was going to take about 20 hours. So eight hours into that flight was the last they were ever heard from. Wow, it's just it was just the two of them. Amelia and Fred Noonan. So there's been lots of in the, you know, almost 100 years since then. Lots of that was 1937. So like 97 Wow, 85 years ago. There's a lot of speculation on what happened a lot of aviation experts, a lot of divers tried to figure out what happened. Obviously, there was a lot of conspiracy theories that something like this when something somebody just disappears conspiracy, there's a come out. They had a cutter ship at Howland Island to help her out and they were there to communicate with theirs. They had radio communications. And that was really frustrating. It wasn't successful. They heard her, but she couldn't hear them.
• 30:24
  Alex: Which was
• 30:24
  Kelly: she thought she didn't realize they were it's kind of like when you and I are first logging in to do our recordings and we're making faces at each other and you know, tapping our headphones and microphones. Can you imagine
• 30:35
  Alex: how often that would have been to hear her saying things like we're running out of gas?
• 30:38
  Alex: We don't we don't, we don't have much gas left. Can't hear you guys. And she would even do things like, she's like, I'm gonna whistle I'm gonna, I'm gonna have a constant stream of whistle just so you can hear me.
• 30:52
  Alex: So she can whistle and she'd be like, I don't know why I can't hear you guys. But you know, we're running out of gas. And I hope we can hit the island
• 31:01
  Kelly: that our Bluetooth headset was out of battery.
• 31:03
  Alex: And then she she didn't have much technology going on.
• 31:07
  Alex: But she was they think what happened was she was she kept circling the island and ran out of gas trying to define it was a very small, small spot. Also, the time zones weren't synced up. I mean, back then we didn't really, you know, because people weren't traveling around the world very much. You can imagine that it's not like time zones were very standard.
• 31:31
  Kelly: nunim was supposed to be a navigator. He was like the, the the better navigator.
• 31:37
  Alex: And he was the one that trained all those pilots. But you know, you're in the wilderness, you're in places that people hadn't hadn't been with planes before. They had just installed a new technology, a new direction system. They had different bands that they could talk on. But the training wasn't real great for that. And the technology was new. And I don't know something. Somebody just said it was really poor planning and poor execution. Also, some people say that they thought they saw that when she took off that she might have lost an antenna, you know, which might
• 32:14
  Kelly: have might have explained why she could communicate on the radio,
• 32:18
  Alex: tons of speculation. They had exhaustive search efforts.
• 32:21
  Alex: They spent like $4 million trying to find her. They never found her and never found Noonan. They never found the plane. And, and the water there just to give you an idea of how much of a needle in a haystack This is. The water is 18,000 feet deep. Dang. Okay, so she it's as deep as she was high, you know, off the ground.
• 32:44
  Kelly: And isn't 5000 feet is a mile?
• 32:48
  Alex: Yeah. 200 Yeah, yeah. So So
• 32:51
  Kelly: it's about three miles deep. Yeah, a little more than three miles deep. Yeah. Wow.
• 32:56
  Alex: But just a few weeks ago, as we're recording this in late January of 2024. They think they found the plane. Recently, just a few weeks ago, they think they found the plane using sonar. And if they're gonna they're gonna take one of those submersibles down. It's kind of like the Titanic. I mean, it's like it's as deep as that thing is
• 33:21
  Kelly: sitting down at the bottom of a very deep part of the ocean. Yeah,
• 33:25
  Alex: there's this submersible company out of Charleston, South Carolina, where they think they found it using sonar. They're gonna go check it out. And if it's what if it is the her? Her plane? It's within 100 miles of Howland Island.
• 33:41
  Kelly: Wow, man. Yeah, I
• 33:42
  Alex: mean, she was right there.
• 33:42
  Alex: Yeah. And like I said, I don't I'm not sure what the weather was like. But I think she just couldn't find it. And she kept circling it and then she was running out of gas, they use the same remember when they take that trip before the other going the other way. They had four people there. And they only had to this times they tried to figure out how much gas they needed based on two fewer people. And they tried to do all these really remedial calculations compared to what you would have today. Right?
• 34:13
  Alex: That would tell you the exact amount of fuel that you need. I mean, they're just estimating how much fuel they need. And they might have just not had enough had enough or because they were circling so much, they might have just miscalculated it. So in terms of the conspiracy theories, the most popular one was that the Japanese captured her or that the Japanese shot her down. I mean, this was lead up to World War Two. Yes, was there was some, some people think that she was shut down by the Japanese.
• 34:48
  Alex: There was some people think that she was captured by the Japanese and there was an unsolved mysteries back in the 90s where they interviewed a lady who said She witnessed her and Noonan being executed by the Japanese.
• 35:05
  Alex: But that was 2700 miles away where they were supposed to be, I just can't imagine. The as slow as they were flying, I can't imagine that they wouldn't would have ended up. And her last communication, she was saying we're running out of gas, I can't imagine she'd end up 3000 miles away.
• 35:24
  Kelly: But that was it, it was really, really bad.
• 35:28
  Alex: Or unless they were really good swimmers. I just can't imagine any of that. But that was a very popular conspiracy theory for a while. One of my favorite conspiracy theories, though, is that she survived and moved to New Jersey and changed her name to Irene Bolam. And that was actually a very popular conspiracy theory so much more that this lady named Irene Bolam, who was actually a pilot in New Jersey, who used to run with the same crowd used to run with Snooki, and Amelia Earhart, and all those people, but she looked a lot like Amelia Earhart. And in the 1970s, she kind of was at some autograph show or something. Gets the rumor came that, you know, that's really Amelia Earhart.
• 36:13
  Alex: And she ended up having to sue somebody for for libel or slander, saying, you know, because people wouldn't Quit bothering her saying she was really Amelia Earhart, this lady. Wow. So the idea that she kind of pulled in all this and, and changed her name and moved away. I think whenever somebody disappears, that's always, it's always a possibility that people want to say is, oh, they probably just got tired of the rat race and just decided to change their name, but there's no reason that she would have done that. I mean, she was trying to get a goal accomplished.
• 36:53
  Kelly: Yeah, it doesn't seem like it doesn't seem like somebody who is that close to setting a record? Even if even if she failed, and she had been rescued? It seems like she would have tried again. You know,
• 37:03
  Alex: I don't know why people were so obsessed with that theory. But people just, you know, want to like I said, Elvis, you know, there's a rumor that Elvis, you ever heard the rumor that almost is in the movie Home Alone? No,
• 37:16
  Kelly: I never had which which one home? Because that's the best. In
• 37:20
  Alex: Home Alone one. When when the mom is standing at the airport counter with John Candy when she first meets John Candy.
• 37:28
  Alex: There's a guy.
• 37:30
  Kelly: I've never seen home alone. Are you serious? But go ahead. I haven't know. And we
• 37:36
  Alex: talked about this before.
• 37:36
  Alex: You didn't, we've died. I didn't know you didn't seen it. So there's a there's a guy standing in the background. And he's kind of too prominent to be an extra.
• 37:49
  Alex: He's just kind of in it a lot.
• 37:49
  Alex: But he's apparently guys a tall guy. And he's got a beard. And he kind of looks like maybe like Elvis would have looked in 1990.
• 37:57
  Alex: But but there's there was a rumor that that was Elvis for a long time. And of course, when I watched the movie, I can't take my eyes off that. Like why?
• 38:09
  Alex: Yeah,
• 38:10
  Kelly: that's your focus now.
• 38:11
  Alex: So you know, in terms of a legacy for this amazing woman, Amelia Earhart, feminist icon, right? I mean, probably one of the most famous women of the 20th century, gave kind of a spirit of can do attitude and a country where that was the attitude that was really the Personality of 20th century America was just so we could do anything we set our mind to a no, no goal is, is too big, you know. And then, and what's always amazed me is that, you know, you go in, in 70 years from less than 70 years from the first flight to landing on the moon. amazing to me.
• 38:55
  Kelly: Yeah. Amazing.
• 38:59
  Alex: But, you know, by World War Two 1000 women were in that what they called the wasps, the women air for Air Force Service Pilots. So they were mechanics.
• 39:07
  Alex: They were pilots. Yeah, we're taking off and I don't know if it's in that movie. sure that you're watching.
• 39:15
  Kelly: You know, there's actually there's actually a museum for that. Just this weird coincidence, I was contacted by a lady who runs that museum, the Wasp museum to potentially do some work for her. It never ended up happening, but I want to say it's near Houston or somewhere in Texas. Oh, really?
• 39:38
  Kelly: Yeah.
• 39:40
  Alex: Oh, I have to check it out. Wonder why it would be you can look it up
• 39:44
  Kelly: Museum. Yeah, national Wasp museum Sweetwater, Texas
• 39:50
  Alex: that's in your Dallas, I think. Yeah, not
• 39:53
  Kelly: Sweetwater near Sugarland, but Sweetwater. Yeah, that is the women air Air Force Service pilots of World War Two.
• 40:03
  Kelly: And but
• 40:03
  Alex: imagine there was 1000 Women in that, you know, and I'm sure that Amelia Earhart was directly responsible for, for many, if not most of those women wanting to get into aviation. I think that's really cool.
• 40:18
  Alex: Absolutely. In 1967 on the 30th anniversary of, of Amelia hearts fatal flight, and Pellegrino flew similar aircraft and did the same flight path and accomplished it. Okay. And then in 1997 1997, San Antonio business woman named Linda Finch retraced it did it again. And I don't know if anybody's had any plans for the 100th anniversary, which is some 13 years from now, but I bet they do something big for I think it's, it's, you know, a damn shame that her life was cut short this way. But, you know, like so many people whose life is cut short doing something so kind of heroic and tragic. You know, the legends, the myths, all that stuff becomes even more pronounced.
• 41:19
  Kelly: Yeah, it amplifies. It amplifies their legendary pneus.
• 41:23
  Kelly: Like when they Yeah,
• 41:24
  Alex: absolutely. And like I said, you know, she reminds me a lot of baby teachers in the areas and just kind of in a time where women were constantly being told they couldn't do stuff. Proven them wrong. So kudos to Amelia Earhart, yeah.
• 41:41
  Kelly: Pour one out for Amelia.
• 41:44
  Alex: Well, that's all I got, man. Well,
• 41:47
  Kelly: that was great. That was great. I actually only knew that she had been a pilot and she had been lost at sea, or, you know, her plane had never been found, or maybe it has at this point, but up until 2024 had never been found. And so that was great. It was right up there with the classic dirt nap city. Somebody you know a little bit about, they're famous. They're interesting, but you want to know more. And that's what we do here. They've
• 42:11
  Alex: made a couple of movies about her but nothing that's been I don't think too heralded.
• 42:14
  Alex: So, according to Wikipedia, there's a reference to her in The Simpsons video game from about 20 years ago where Mr.
• 42:27
  Alex: Burns had her plane shot down because she said he was said she was getting too big for her job spurs.
• 42:38
  Kelly: Of course, Mr. Burns, Monty
• 42:43
  Alex: always comes back to the Simpsons. You
• 42:45
  Kelly: know, you've made it when you're referencing the Simpsons video game. All
• 42:49
  Alex: right, man. It's good, good. sharing this with you.
• 42:53
  Alex: Enjoyed
• 42:53
  Kelly: it. And if you like women who broke the mold, check out Babe Didrikson Zaharias check out Eleanor Roosevelt. And you can also check out Howard Hughes if you like aviators, so you know lots lots of tangential stuff for you to check out here on dirt nap city. Alright, buy
• 43:17
  Unknown: him out on the ocean Justice back against the sky.
• 43:22
  Unknown: Amelia Hawk flying out there with a partner Captain Noonan on the second of July blainville in the ocean far away