Amelia Earhart was born in 1897 in Kansas and moved to Iowa as a child, she took her first flight in 1920 and went on to break many records as a pioneering female pilot, setting the altitude record for women in 1922 and becoming the first woman to fly solo across the North American continent and Atlantic Ocean. In 1937, on an attempt to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific Ocean on the challenging flight from New Guinea to Howland Island.