Amelia Earhart was an aviation pioneer and the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Earhart earned her way as a faculty member of Purdue University in their aviation department in 1935. Her popularity was at a peak by this point due to her connection with Charles Lindbergh. Her celebrity status helped finance many of her aviation adventures back in the 1920s. While at Purdue University she was tasked with counselling women careers options as well as a technical advisor to the Department of Aeronautics. Working at Purdue paid off because their generous donation of a Lockheed airplane allowed Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan to attempt to circumnavigate the globe. The attempt started in Miami, Florida on June 1, 1937, from there she and her navigator travelled east and landed in places such as: South America, Africa, Indian, Southeast Asia, and finally landing in New Guinea where the last leg of the flight was to take place across the Pacific. Somewhere over the Pacific however through broken radio communication it seems the plane ran out of gas and crashed, never to be seen or heard from again.
Speculation on the whereabouts of the flight have been searched by people for years. Recently an expedition was made by Ric Gillespie and the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. There findings took them back to Nikumaroro, a remote uninhabited island in the southwestern Pacific. A discovery in 1940 of a partial skeleton that seemed to fit description of Earhart was found there but later lost. This group has been making visits to the island since 1989 and have uncovered numerous artifacts indicating a castaway presence on the island including female products. The group is hoping that DNA evidence will lead them to realize that Amelia Earhart was indeed a castaway on this island for days if not months before she died.
http://news.discovery.com/adventure/amelia-earhart-island-artifacts.html
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