As a passenger aboard the Friendship, became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by airplane, landing in Wales after 20 hours 40 minutes.
On June 17, 1928, Amelia Earhart departed Trepassey, Newfoundland, aboard the Fokker F.VIIb/3m floatplane Friendship, piloted by Wilmer Stultz with mechanic Louis Gordon. After a grueling 20 hours and 40 minutes of flight, much of it through thick cloud and turbulent weather, the aircraft landed on June 18 at Burry Port, Wales.
Although Earhart did not pilot the aircraft on this crossing — a fact she was candid about, famously remarking she was 'just baggage, like a sack of potatoes' — the flight made her instantly world-famous as the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, just a year after Charles Lindbergh's solo crossing captured global attention.
The flight was organized and financed with the backing of publisher George P. Putnam, who recognized in Earhart the ideal public figure to capture America's imagination: articulate, photogenic, and comfortable with the press. The achievement catapulted her to celebrity status overnight, and she would leverage that fame to advocate for women's expanded role in aviation. It set the stage for her later, far more personally significant achievement of soloing the Atlantic herself in 1932, addressing the very criticism that she had merely been a passenger the first time.