On this episode of Our American Stories, Amelia Earhart had already crossed the Atlantic by airplane, but in 1928 she had done so as a passenger. Four years later, she climbed into a single-engine Lockheed Vega in Newfoundland and set out alone, battling storms and mechanical trouble before landing in a pasture in Northern Ireland nearly 15 hours later.
The flight made Earhart the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic and earned her the Distinguished Flying Cross, the first awarded to a woman. Later that same year, she added another record by flying solo across the United States from Los Angeles to Newark.
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