Amelia Earhart and the Friendship, the gold trimotor that crossed the Atlantic on June seventeenth, nineteen twenty-eight

SUMMARY: On June 17, 1928, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air aboard the Friendship—as a passenger, not the pilot.

On June 17, 1928, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean by air, aboard a gold-and-orange Fokker trimotor named the Friendship. But she did not fly it. Pilot Wilmer “Bill” Stultz handled the controls and the instruments, mechanic Louis “Slim” Gordon tended the engines, and Earhart kept the log. She called herself “just baggage”—and that honest discomfort, more than the flight itself, is what set her on the path to becoming a genuine aviation legend.

Why the 1928 Atlantic Crossing Was So Dangerous

In 1928, the Atlantic was still a graveyard for aviators. It had been only nine years since Alcock and Brown made the first nonstop crossing, and barely a year since Charles Lindbergh flew solo from New York to Paris and became the most famous person on earth.

After Lindbergh, everyone wanted a piece of the ocean, and many died trying. That year’s newspapers were full of crews that took off into the gray and were never heard from again.

One thing remained undone: no woman had crossed the Atlantic by air. A few had tried. Some never came back.

How Amelia Earhart Was Chosen for the Flight

A wealthy American living in London, Amy Phipps Guest, bought a Fokker trimotor intending to make the crossing herself. Her family talked her out of it, but she refused to abandon the idea. Instead, she insisted the airplane carry “the right young woman” in her place—someone who would represent American womanhood with the proper image.

The search landed with New York publisher George Putnam, who found a social worker in Boston: a tall, quiet woman who flew on weekends, kept her hair short, and bore a striking resemblance to Lindbergh. The press would soon call her “Lady Lindy.”

Her name was Amelia Earhart.

Who Amelia Earhart Really Was in 1928

The Earhart of 1928 was not yet the legend most people picture. She held a pilot’s license and had set a women’s altitude record in her bright yellow Kinner Airster. But she worked as a social worker at a settlement house, teaching English to immigrant children.

She was not a long-distance aviator. She had never flown a three-engine aircraft. She had no experience flying on instruments—in cloud, over open water, with no horizon and nothing but a compass to keep the wings level.

And from the start, she understood the part that gnawed at her: on this flight, she would not be the pilot. Her official title was commander of the expedition. Her real job was to keep the flight log and to be the public face when they landed.

The Friendship: The Airplane That Made the Crossing

The aircraft was a Fokker, a big high-wing monoplane designed by Anthony Fokker in Holland. This one carried three Wright Whirlwind J-5 engines—the same engine family that pulled Lindbergh across the year before—each producing just over 200 horsepower.

Its wheels had been replaced with two large pontoons, because the plan called for taking off from water and landing on water. They named her the Friendship.

The Long Wait at Trepassey, Newfoundland

The crew staged through Boston and up to Trepassey, Newfoundland, the jumping-off point. Then they waited—for nearly two weeks.

Fog rolled off the Grand Banks. The wind came up wrong. The swell ran too high to lift a fuel-heavy airplane off the water. They tried repeatedly: load the fuel, taxi out, firewall all three engines—and the airplane would plow through the chop, throwing spray, refusing to climb onto the step and fly. Then they would offload fuel and wait again.

Morale rotted in the little fishing village. The press grew restless, and there was real fear that another woman would beat them across.

Earhart had given up her cabin space and most of her weight allowance for fuel. She carried one change of clothes. She wrote letters home meant to be read only if she didn’t return—telling her father she knew the hazards and wanted to go because she wanted to, and writing something gentler to her mother.

Crossing the Atlantic Aboard the Friendship

On the morning of June 17, 1928, the weather finally opened a window. The water laid down just enough.

The airplane was loaded so heavily that Stultz couldn’t get her airborne on the first run—they had to dump fuel in the harbor to lighten her. Then, with all three Whirlwinds screaming, the Fokker clawed free of the Atlantic and turned east, with no land ahead for 2,000 miles.

Inside, there was no heated cabin and no soundproofing. The roar of three unmuffled radial engines was a physical force—after twenty hours, men went deaf for days. The cabin was jammed with fuel tanks and gear, and Earhart was wedged among it in a borrowed fur-lined suit, recording engine performance, drift, weather, and time.

Then the weather closed in, as it always does over the North Atlantic. The crew flew into fog and cloud and could not climb out. This is where Stultz earned his reputation, flying the trimotor on instruments hour after hour with the primitive gauges of 1928: a turn indicator, an unreliable altimeter, and a compass swinging in the turbulence. No radar, no GPS, no usable autopilot—just the discipline to trust the panel over his own inner ear.

Earhart watched him do it, and she understood exactly what she was seeing: the skill she did not yet have.

Getting Lost and Reaching Burry Port, Wales

The winds aloft were not what they’d planned for. The radio gave trouble. As the fuel dropped, no one aboard knew whether they would reach Ireland, England, France—or the water. At one point they spotted a ship, and Earhart tried to drop a written note asking for a heading. It missed.

Twenty hours and forty minutes after leaving Newfoundland, with the fuel gauges crawling toward empty, a coastline appeared through a break in the murk. They set the pontoons down on the water off Burry Port, Wales.

In a detail that captures the moment perfectly, no one onshore noticed at first. The exhausted crew bobbed in the harbor, waving at workmen who simply waved back and went on with their day—three people who had just made history, struggling to get anyone to row out and tie them off.

“Just Baggage”: Earhart’s Honesty About the Flight

When the world caught on, the fame came down like a flood tide. London, New York, a ticker-tape parade, congratulations from President Coolidge. Overnight, the quiet Boston social worker was one of the most famous women alive.

And she hated the part that wasn’t true. In interview after interview, she insisted that Stultz had done all the flying and deserved the credit, calling herself a passenger—“baggage,” like “a sack of potatoes.” The public wanted a heroine and had decided she was it, but she would not be celebrated for sitting in the back of an airplane two professionals had flown across the sea.

The Real Legacy: The 1932 Solo Atlantic Flight

A lesser person would have pocketed the fame and coasted. Earhart turned that hollow feeling into fuel, promising herself she would one day fly the Atlantic alone, as pilot in command.

Four years later, in 1932—on the fifth anniversary of Lindbergh’s flight—she took off from Newfoundland in a red Lockheed Vega and flew the North Atlantic solo. She fought a cracked exhaust manifold spitting flame, ice on the wings, a failed altimeter, and a fuel leak before coming down in a pasture in Northern Ireland.

That time, no one could call her baggage. She became the second person ever to fly the Atlantic alone, and the first woman to do it. The Friendship had taught her she could not live on borrowed glory.

Earhart was lost over the Pacific in 1937, and the full story of her disappearance remains unknown. But the aviator the world remembers—the pilot in command—was truly born on that gray morning in Trepassey, not because of what she did on the flight, but because of how she refused to feel about it afterward.

Key Takeaways

• On June 17, 1928, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air aboard the Fokker trimotor Friendship—but as logkeeper and commander, not pilot.
• Wilmer “Bill” Stultz flew the aircraft, including hours of demanding instrument flying through North Atlantic fog, with mechanic Louis “Slim” Gordon aboard.
• The flight took 20 hours and 40 minutes from Trepassey, Newfoundland, ending at Burry Port, Wales, after nearly two weeks of weather delays.
• Earhart openly called herself “just baggage” and refused to take credit she felt she hadn’t earned.
• That honesty drove her to fly the Atlantic solo in 1932, becoming the first woman and second person ever to do so.