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Obviously research regarding technological unemployment is as vital today as further refinement and production of labor-saving and comfort-giving devices. Among all the marvels of modern invention, that with which I am most concerned is of course air transportation. Flying is perhaps the most dramatic of recent scientific attainments. In the brief span of thirty-odd years the world has seen an inventor's dream, first materialized by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, become an everyday actuality. Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but to me it seems that no other phase of modern progress contrives to maintain such a brimming measure of romance and beauty, coupled with utility, as does aviation.

Within itself this industry embraces many of the scientific accomplishments which yesterday seemed fantastic impossibility. The pilot, winging his way above the Earth at two hundred miles an hour talks by radio telephone to ground stations, or to other planes in the air. In thick weather he is guided by radio beams and receives detailed reports of conditions ahead, gleaned through special instruments and new methods of meteorogical calculations. He sits behind engines, the reliability of which, measured by yardsticks of the past, is all but unbelievable. I myself still fly a Wasp motor, which has carried me over the North Atlantic, part of the Pacific, to and from Mexico City, and many times across this continent. Aviation, this young, modern giant, exemplifies the possible relationship of women and the creations of science.

Although women as yet have not taken full advantage of its use and benefits, air travel is as available to them, as to men.

Background:

On May 21, 1932, five years to the day that American aviator Charles Lindbergh became the first pilot to accomplish a solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, female aviator Amelia Earhart repeated the feat, landing her plane in Ireland after flying across the North Atlantic. Earhart, who had traveled 2,000 miles from Newfoundland in fourteen hours, was the first female pilot to make the journey alone. However, unlike Lindbergh before her, Earhart was well known to the public before her solo transatlantic flight. In 1928, as a member of a three-member crew, she had become the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an aircraft. Although her only function during the crossing was to keep the plane's log, the event won her national fame, and Americans were enamored with the modest and daring young pilot. For her solo transatlantic crossing in 1932, she was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross by the U.S. Congress. In 1935, in the first flight of its kind, she flew solo from Wheeler Field in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California, winning a $10,000 award posted by Hawaiian commercial interests. In June of the same year, she was appointed Purdue University's career counselor to women's studies and special advisor in aeronautics, and the school purchased her a modern Lockheed Electra aircraft. Two years later, she attempted, along with copilot Frederick J. Noonan, to fly the Lockheed around the world, but the plane was lost on July 2, 1937, somewhere between New Guinea and Howland Island in the South Pacific. The details of the aircraft's disappearance remain a mystery.