Earhart Learns to Fly
After her first ride in an aeroplane at Long Beach in 1920, Earhart learned to fly the next year and bought a yellow biplane she called the Canary.
Amelia Earhart · Public domain · Source
On 28 December 1920 the 23-year-old Amelia Earhart took a ten-minute ride in an aeroplane at an airfield in Long Beach, California. “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground,” she later wrote, “I knew I had to fly.” In January 1921 she began lessons with the aviator Neta Snook, and with money saved from telephone-company and photography jobs, plus her mother’s help, she bought a yellow Kinner biplane she named the Canary.
In 1922 she set a women’s altitude record in it (about 4,300 m), and in 1923 she became the sixteenth woman in the United States to receive a pilot’s licence. Flying lessons and aircraft kept her short of money, but she never left the sky.
