Two years before the Atlantic, Earhart trained on instruments at Butler and had long-range tanks put in the Vega that made the crossing
A Pirep featured story · KBTP Pittsburgh-Butler Regional, Butler, PA
Pittsburgh-Butler opened on the former Nixon and Dodds farms at the end of September 1929, and Amelia Earhart showed up almost immediately: the papers put her at the field for a lunch stop on October 13, 1929, ferrying west from Long Island to California. The airport was two weeks old.
She came back in 1930 with her Lockheed Vega 5B, and this is Butler's real claim on the record: the field installed long-range fuel tanks in the Vega and put her through instrument training. Two years later, on May 20, 1932, she lifted that same red Vega off from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, and set it down in a pasture at Culmore, outside Londonderry, 14 hours and 56 minutes later; the first woman to fly the Atlantic alone, and a Distinguished Flying Cross. The airplane hangs in the Smithsonian today.
The instructor most tied to the field is Kenneth W. Scholter, who managed Butler from 1935 to 1969 with a reputation as tough as they come, trained Army and Navy cadets under the wartime CAA program, and left his name on the place: the field is K.W. Scholter Field in his honor. Local telling puts Earhart's instrument work in his hands. Helen Richey, the McKeesport pilot who became the first woman to fly a scheduled US commercial airliner, later served here as the only female flight instructor for Army Air Corps cadets.
The field is still general aviation through and through, mostly flight training, which is the fitting part: the airport where Earhart tanked up and tightened her instrument flying is still teaching people to fly. Land at KBTP and you park two hangars away from 1929; the pair that stood at the grand opening still serve tenants today.