Earhart had become instantly famous in 1928, as the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a plane. But, though she’d been photographed wearing a flight suit and a leather helmet, she was merely a passenger; the plane had actually been piloted by two men, Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon. She had since been working on establishing her command of the cockpit. There were plenty of accomplished female pilots who could’ve taken command of a transatlantic flight themselves, and some of these women considered Earhart’s notoriety unearned. In 1932, after logging more flight miles—but not as many as other top female pilots—she flew solo across the Atlantic in a cramped red Vega, a single-engine plane barely insulated against storms and cold temperatures. She fought exhaustion, iced wings, and a broken altimeter. Her intention was to land in Paris, but she ended up in a cow field in Ireland. Earhart approached the experience with an easy, almost reckless, confidence. She’d always been this way; as a girl growing up in the Kansas City area, she jury-rigged a “roller coaster” with steep ramps, then barrelled down it and fell off, only to exult, “This is just like flying!”
A globe-circling flight would be Earhart’s lengthiest journey by far, twenty-nine thousand miles hugging the equator. This wasn’t mere hopping among landmasses, as with Post’s route. Her path had been ambitiously charted to include a refuelling stop on Howland Island, a speck between Hawaii and Australia. A pilot making such a journey needed to be in excellent shape, with sufficient strength and stamina to manage the controls in turbulence, particularly during long hours in a cockpit with no autopilot. The dangers were extraordinary: enormous stretches over open ocean, unpredictable weather, extended isolation, intense psychological pressure. Yet the rewards promised to be substantial, from marketing opportunities to media attention. NBC and CBS were fighting over the rights to exclusive broadcasts.
Noonan and Manning had agreed to accompany Earhart nearly the whole way. They were excited to be associated with her glamour, but they also considered the job a risk. Rather than spending time practicing in the powerful Electra, Earhart had been crisscrossing the country, giving lectures, making sponsorship appearances, and attending promotional events. For a while, she had a gig as the aviation editor at Cosmopolitan, in which she published a column about flying; she also launched a line of pilot-inspired women’s clothing. Seen from today’s perspective, Earhart was at once a pioneering aviator and a proto-influencer. Her goal, in both roles, was to keep topping herself—and to keep the public captivated.