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  • hello subscribers and others watching David Hoppe and filmmaker I'm about to show You a story that I made back in 1997 about a woman who flew around the world herself, solo piloting to do what Amelia Earhart had said she was going to do.

  • But Amelia died along the way.

  • Do you know the story of a Mini A Rod?

  • You know, Amelia Airai Waas when she was an extraordinary American woman.

  • She was a pilot at the time of the great racing days of aviation when these pilots, like Amidror, were stars like Hollywood stars or rock stars.

  • Very famous, world famous.

  • She was beautiful.

  • She was out spoken.

  • She was courageous and she was kind of a symbol for women.

  • Of the things women could do.

  • She made this statement largely to women.

  • You should have your dreams, and you should not live within the limits that society has set for you.

  • So think about this woman, Linda Finch.

  • Linda Finch, a businesswoman, real estate developer, successful woman becomes addicted to flying and she rebuilds the exact plane Exactly that.

  • Amelia Earhart flew the Lockheed 10 e and she trains herself and she gets a Navigator.

  • Just like, um, idiot did.

  • And she sets off in 1997 to fly around the world.

  • I think she called her project.

  • You can soar A media accomplished what she accomplished with a lot of class and a lot of style, and she had the backing of her husband, who was a rich guy.

  • George Putnam give you an idea of her character in her pre nup, she said.

  • Look, if either one of us wants to get out of this in the first year, we can separate with no cost.

  • So she was not allowed to get married, but she didn't need George Putnam support.

  • And she says she's gonna fly around the world.

  • She doesn't take off from Oakland and fly around the world and be the first woman solo pilot to fly around the world.

  • It doesn't make it.

  • She dies somewhere in the South Pacific.

  • Nobody knows exactly where they've been.

  • Many efforts to find Amelia the last one, I think.

  • In 2019 Summer of 2019.

  • Robert Valid, The Great Nautical Explorer goes out with all of his team to this little teeny island where they think they heard the signal from her airplane, the distress signal and they did not find anything.

  • Unfortunately, the plane probably disintegrated, but the engines might still be there.

  • So there's still people looking for what happened to Amelia Earhart.

  • It was, and to some extent, still is national news.

  • So you're about to see a film where Linda Finch attempts to recreate that flight, and this time she has tens of millions of American students following.

  • NASA is following her online, but still, it's a pretty tough trip.

  • She'll tell you about it in this film.

  • I have restored several airplanes in the past, and I was looking for a new airplane project started really to kind of research what I wanted to think about that, and I wanted something that was more graceful, wanted something that was older.

  • It's a different You're a common but exciting here at the same time, and the Electra first caught my attention as I was learning about the electro, the first thing I had to to learn about Amelia and I got these books that she wrote, and I could I could feel what she was saying.

  • I'd start laughing out loud.

  • It was just she would use the same words or, you know, or destroyed the same feelings.

  • It was It was just, you know, it was like I just knew her.

  • She captivated us.

  • She was doing the things, all of us the female pilots wanted to do.

  • They called us daredevils of the skies, but she he was our hero.

  • It wasn't her beauty.

  • She had a special way about her.

  • She was up there with the gods, yet she acted as if she was on the same level as the rest of us.

  • My name's meaning Avalon and your occupation.

  • I'm a fire.

  • It was almost 60 years ago when Amelia Earhart took off on her world flood.

  • It was the most challenging air adventure anyone had attempted 27,000 miles around the world at the equator.

  • 60 years later, on March 17th 1997 Linda Finch, accomplished pilot and San Antonio businesswomen will attempt to recreate Amelia's expedition in a perfectly restored Elektra.

  • I will be recreating it in exactly the same aircraft.

  • The model that she used it is a Lockheed Electra 10 e.

  • There's someone of two left in the world.

  • There are only about 15 manufactured ever since, a very rare craft, and it's being restored as an exact replica of Amelia's airplane.

  • The route will be exactly the same as she flew with exceptional landing at Howland Island, which there's no longer runway, that we will overfly Howland and drop a wreath.

  • And in her memory there she was absolutely fearless, absolutely fearless, more Southern.

  • I absolutely more so than I.

  • She flew across the Atlantic initially as a passenger, and she got more attention than the pilot nobody knows.

  • The name of that pilot flew across the Atlantic in 1928.

  • Nobody and Amelia was the most famous woman in the world.

  • She described her experiences being like a sack of potatoes.

  • She was totally useless, and she was somewhat embarrassed by the attention that she received.

  • There was nobody else look up, too.

  • She was the only hero when we had.

  • We look forward to the next edition of the paper to see what immediate was doing next in 1930 to 5 years to the day on the anniversary of Lindbergh's flight is when she flew solo across Atlanta.

  • Approximately 17 attempts had failed.

  • Many people have died.

  • No one else could duplicate what he had done.

  • And she did.

  • Looking back at Amelia All weaken.

  • See our gracious public performances before the newsreel cameras.

  • But what she achieved in those old airplanes was no mean feat.

  • What is the latest in part on the way it took great courage to attempt to cross the Atlantic alone for just a minute to get by writing in her log, Amelia described it this way.

  • 12 minutes after seven wind was right at Harbor Grace.

  • So I gave my Vega the gun.

  • Despite the heavy fuel load, she rose immediately.

  • A minute later, I was headed out to sea, cruising at about 12,000 feet.

  • An enormous cloud loomed before me.

  • It was too high for me to climb over, so I had to fly straight into an electrical storm.

  • Wind tossed and battered.

  • The Vega I couldn't see out of my carpet on was flying completely blind.

  • My altimeter failed, leaving me to guess in the dark how high or low I was flying.

  • It was impossible to stay on course.

  • I began picking up ice, a hazard all flyers dread at the same time, a weld in the exhaust manifold cracked on, flames from the engine blazed in the night.

  • I died down in the hope that the ice would melt but heavy with ice.

  • My plane went into a spin.

  • I pulled out of it so near to the sea that I could see the waves breaking beneath me.

  • I was forced to climb.

  • It wasn't safe to use my instruments.

  • So near the surface, because of the farm, ice formed again on the windshield.

  • For the next 10 hours, I fought to stay low enough to prevent icing but high enough to fly safely on my instruments.

  • The cabin stank of gas fumes, but it was critical to have fuel for the engine.

  • My transatlantic rations consisted of one can of tomato juice, which I pierced with an ice pick the last two hours with the hardest.

  • When I reached up to turn on my reserve fuel tank, I found the gauge was broken.

  • Gasoline began dripping down the back of my neck.

  • I had no idea how much fuel I had left.

  • Shortly after dawn, I spotted a fishing boat and then a coastline.

  • I couldn't see a landing field, so I came down in a long sloping meadow.

  • Amelia's landing in Ireland took local farmer Dan McCallion by surprise.

  • Where am I?

  • She asked him here in daddy, sir.

  • In Derry, on London.

  • Berry?

  • Yes, sir.

  • I mean Mom.

  • And And have you come far from America?

  • Holy Mother of God.

  • McCallion muttered It wasn't long before she was besieged by newsmen, photographers and autograph hunters.

  • The world had fallen in love with Amelia Earhart.

  • When she returned to New York, Amelia was America's dark ready.

  • She didn't like the thing, but she accepted it because it was she had to do if she was going to accomplish what she wanted to do, Tristen gets fire.

  • Women get off their duffs and to what they wanted to do.

  • You know, I say one thing.

  • It does not take courage.

  • So much to go on.

  • It doesn't interest in the past, I believe that women have as much courage as man.

  • Flying was really secondary to her mission of communicating to people that they did not have to live within the limits that society set for them.

  • And her big.

  • Her big message at that time was women in the early 19 thirties that were so cared for that.

  • They were taught limits.

  • They were taught to live smaller lives.

  • And they needed to do Amelia inspired women to conquer new horizons.

  • Eleanor Roosevelt said she helped the cause of women by giving us a feeling there was nothing we couldn't do.

  • Yesterday I hopped off from last Angelus about noontime and landed in New York this morning after a nonstop transcontinental trip.

  • It took me 19 hours and a few minutes to complete the journey.

  • And what did you carry on the trip?

  • You mean eat?

  • Yeah, they even drink.

  • Well, I carried some water, of course, because my cockpit is very warm and I carried a sandwich in case I didn't eat it, though I carried some hot chocolate and the old reliable commodity Amelia Earhart kept on pushing.

  • Nothing was going to stop her.

  • She had a dream.

  • A vision for her future.

  • Ah, vision.

  • She had not yet stated publicly.

  • But we all felt it was coming.

  • Well, I haven't made any flight announcements yet officially, but maybe some of the guests is the right.

  • Anyway, the ship is equipped to fly a long distance.

  • She mentioned to us that she was considering an expedition around the equator.

  • She would need an Electra, the most modern, most graceful airplane we had ever seen.

  • Linda Finch is determined to recreate their hearts flight exactly to succeed, her 60 year old Electra must be restored.

  • The absolute perfection.

  • When the airplane got here, it was on a trailer, almost like it.

  • An angle like it would be banking.

  • And it was all nasty.

  • And half the paint was stripped and half of it was off and the wings were laying underneath and it came around the corner of the hangar.

  • And when I saw that, I mean, I just have goose bumps, and it was almost like her plane was just coming back.

  • I got the rest of these pictures, guys.

  • Oh, great.

  • When I first got here, I was like, Well, where's the blueprints?

  • And they showed me a stack of photographs.

  • Here's a magnifying glass, and that's what we had to counter ex accounted rivets, you know, out of a photograph.

  • Okay, look, it's 12 reverts back, and that's where that Lang goes.

  • And I mean, that's how we put this thing together.

  • This is a piece that we're gonna have to goto Oakland and take off Fred's airplane.

  • That's right.

  • There's no way to know, to begin with, whether we had all the parts or what parts were actually missing too weak.

  • I got to the point of actually assembling some of them.

  • This is really like this.

  • It's a leading edge up front.