Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum

The Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum an aviation museum located in Atchison, Kansas that is focused on Amelia Earhart, of course.

The museum’s prize possession is the restored Muriel, a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra that is identical to the plane that Earhart flew on her final flight. Only 14 10E’s were made, and this is the last one remaining. It’s named in honor of Amelia’s sister.

The caption to this read, “This photograph of Amelia was taken in California in 1922, soon after she fell in love with flying.” You can see it on her face!

Though there are many exhibits in the museum, they most feature pictures and text, there’s not much memorabilia related to Amelia to see in the museum. The exhibits start with Amelia’s childhood (which we wrote about here) and of course end with the mystery surrounding her disappearance.

When she was 23, Amelia attended an “aerial meet” with her father, and was immediately interested trying it out herself. She paid $10 the next day to be taken up in a plane, and just a week later she’d already arranged flying lessons for herself (1921).

In 1922 she set a world record for female pilots by flying to an altitude of 14,000 feet. Though she worked a number of varying jobs, she struggled financially, as flying wasn’t cheap! However, things changed for the better when in 1928 she became a household name for being the first female passenger to cross the Atlantic by airplane.

Note that she was just the passenger in that flight, not the pilot! She wanted to pilot the plane, but was not allowed. However, within a few years she remedied that, becoming the first woman to make a nonstop, solo, transatlantic flight (1932).

A model of Amelia’s Lockheed Vega 5B, which she used for her solo flight across the Atlantic. She called it her “Little Red Bus.”

A photo shoot circa 1934 to promote her fashion line. In 1934 she was named one of the ten best dressed women in America by Fashion Designers of America.

Amelia embraced the life of a celebrity, as it helped her obtain funding and assistance towards achieving her flying goals. She wrote columns and books, went on lecture tours, endorsed products, and even started a fashion line (you can see some items in our post here).

She continued chasing world records, because that’s what kept her in the public eye.

Amelia was just 39 when she and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to become the first female pilot to fly around the world. They had flown the Lockheed Model 10-E Electra 22,000 miles of their planned 29,000 route (with refueling and maintenance stops along the way).

The museum explores the various theories about what happened to them, though it seems pretty clear that they ran out of fuel and crashed while searching for their tiny (just one square mile) landing spot, Howland Island.

Amelia adjusting the controls in her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra.

Amelia’s Lockheed Model 10-E Electra used for her around-the-world-attempt was tight quarters – it was mostly packed with fuel!

Most intriguing is the idea that they have they survived the crash. If so, how long did they survice, and then what happened to them? We listened to an audiobook by Candace Fleming, Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart (affiliate link), which goes into the many reports of transmissions heard in the following days that seem to have been from Amelia. It’s very curious!

No physical evidence of Earhart, Noonan, or the plane have ever been found. However, there is an ongoing investigation into a 2024 discovery of a correctly-sized object 16,000 feet under the ocean within 100 miles of Howland Island. Exciting!