Hangar One

In June 1935 the president of Purdue University, Edward Elliott, announced an unusual appointment to his staff. The newest visiting faculty member: technical advisor to the Department of Aeronautics and career counselor for women, the first such counselor at any American university; was the most famous female pilot in the world. Amelia Earhart had just become the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California, and the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. She was 37.

Earhart arrived in West Lafayette on November 6, 1935. For several weeks each semester she lived in the new women's residence hall, taught informally in lounges and dining halls, wore pants on a campus where women were expected to wear skirts, and counseled female students about careers in fields they had never been told were open to them. She also had access to the only university-owned airport in the United States. Purdue had built it in 1930, partly because Elliott understood aviation was about to be enormous, and partly because he wanted students to be able to fly.

In April 1936 the Purdue Research Foundation established the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research. J. K. Lilly Sr. of Indianapolis put in money. So did David Ross and several other Hoosier businessmen, along with Western Electric, Goodyear, and Goodrich. In July, Earhart used the fund to buy a twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E that she called the Flying Laboratory. She kept it at Hangar One on the Purdue airfield. People in West Lafayette spent the winter and spring of 1936-37 looking up at the sound of two Pratt & Whitney Wasps overhead: Amelia Earhart practicing for the longest flight ever attempted, around the equator.

She left Miami on June 1, 1937, with navigator Fred Noonan. On July 2 they disappeared over the central Pacific near Howland Island. They had flown 22,000 of the 29,000 miles.

In 2025, eighty-eight years later, Purdue opened a new terminal at the airport she had flown out of, and named it for her.