The Lockheed Vega and Amelia Earhart's 1932 Solo Atlantic Crossing

The Atlantic crossing that ended in a Northern Irish pasture began five years to the day after Lindbergh left New York for Paris.

On the evening of 20 May 1932, Amelia Earhart took off from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, in her dark red Lockheed Vega 5B. Its cantilever high wing needed no external wing struts, and its wooden monocoque fuselage carried loads through its shell. A deep NACA cowling enclosed the Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine, while streamlined wheel spats covered the fixed landing gear. The compact airplane carried extra fuel for a journey that would last through the night.

About four hours out, a weld cracked in the exhaust collector ring. Flames became visible in the darkness, an alarming companion over open water. Her altimeter failed as well, removing the instrument that would ordinarily tell her height above the sea. Those failures required judgment from a pilot who still had many hours of ocean ahead.

Severe icing forced the Vega down toward the waves before Earhart climbed clear again. She had intended to reach Paris, but keeping the aircraft flying and finding a safe landing place became more important than matching an earlier arrival. After 14 hours and 56 minutes and about 2,026 miles, she landed in a pasture at Ballyarnett, near Culmore and Derry in Northern Ireland.

Earhart became the first woman, and the second person, to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. The pasture belongs in the account alongside the departure field, because it records the decisions that brought the flight to a safe end. The Vega preserved by the Smithsonian gives those decisions a physical setting: a small wooden airplane, an enclosed cockpit, and an ocean’s worth of fuel.