Amelia Earhart (1897 - 1937) earned her pilot's wings in her early twenties and became the best-known female aviator of her time-probably of all time. In 1928, as a passenger in the Fokker tri-motor Friendship, she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane. Four years later, she flew the ocean solo, duplicating Charles Lindbergh's much-heralded 1927 flight. During her two-decade career as a pilot, Earhart set altitude records, speed records, and transcontinental flight records and was the first person to solo the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii to California, and the first to fly an autogiro (predecessor to today's helicopter) across the country. In 1937, Earhart attempted to fly around the world at the Equator but, just days before her fortieth birthday, she vanished, together with navigator Fred Noonan, en route to tiny Howland Island in the Pacific. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the largest ocean search ever undertaken but no trace of the Lockheed Electra nor of Earhart and Noonan was found. The circumstances of their disappearance have yet to be unravelled but searches by independent individuals and groups continue, and the new technologies being employed may eventually solve the mystery.