Finding Your Identity and Creating Breakthroughs in Life, with Amelia Rose Earhart – Episode 142 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Author, speaker, artist and pilot Amelia Rose Earhart explains how her famous namesake ignited her life’s passion, why flying around the world isn’t enough without a good narrative, piecing together a secret flightplan, planning for disaster over international waters, and the true meaning of identity.

About Amelia:

When Amelia Rose Earhart decided to honor her namesake, aviation pioneer Amelia Mary Earhart, she did it in the biggest way possible — by becoming the first person to pilot a single-engine Pilatus PC-12-NG around the world. The journey to successfully complete this 28,000 nautical miles flight included challenges and obstacles, but ultimately taught her invaluable lessons about life.

It was an odds-defying achievement that included more than two years of route and logistical planning, extensive flight training, open water survival training, and recruiting, training, and leading a team of 100 people. Utilizing the invaluable concept of a flight plan to achieve her dream, Amelia crafted a strategic business plan to design, fund, and market her flight. In the process, she developed a large and passionate social following and forged almost $2 million in partnerships with 28 corporations. Through the Fly with Amelia Foundation, a nonprofit she founded to foster the next generation of women in aviation, Amelia granted 10 flight training scholarships to women ages 16-18 as she circled the plane over Howland Island, the area of the South Pacific Ocean where Amelia Earhart disappeared.

Amelia’s story of hard work, determination, and dedication resonates deeply with many audiences. She takes them along on her epic flight—from Howland Island to touching down on the same runway where she departed in 1937—drawing powerful comparisons to how we lead, work as teams, handle turbulence, and boldly journey into uncharted territory with confidence. Amelia has earned rave reviews from audiences ranging from the Fortune 500 to the United States Air Force Academy. Her book, “Learn to Love the Turbulence: Flight Lessons on Becoming the Pilot in Command of Your Own Journey”, teaches readers how to navigate the inevitable storms that come with taking flight toward the life we were meant to live.

Before flying around the world, Ms. Earhart was best known as a television news anchor and reporter, covering breaking news, traffic, and weather in Denver and Los Angeles. She continues to use her professional interviewing and polished presenting skills as an emcee and moderator. Her story has been featured in major media outlets, including CNN, The New York Times, The Today Show, and others.

She is a recipient of the Amelia Earhart Pioneering Achievement Award and was named by the Jaycees as one of the “Top Ten Young Americans.”

Learn more at AmeliaRoseEarhart.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host: Amelia Rose Earhart is a woman who believes that anything is possible with a solid flight plan. Now you might first be taken back by Amelia Earhart, like THE Amelia Earhart. No, that Amelia Earhart died several years ago, but this is the new the Amelia Rose Earhart. And just like her namesake, Amelia took a 28,000 mile flight around the world in a single engine aircraft. Less than 30 women have ever been the pilot in command on a flight around the world. And she’s an amazing woman, she is a speaker and an online, you know, real popular online influencer. So Amelia, thanks for being here.

Amelia Rose Earhart: Thanks for having me on. Glad to be here.

Host: So let’s get the basic stuff out of the way. So you, you have a very famous name. And I’m sure there’s been ups and downs to that. Can you just tell us the story about how you ended up with the name and how it’s kind of impacted your life?

Amelia Rose Earhart: Sure. Well, let me start by saying that every single day of my life, I have to explain my name multiple times because, you know, when you have a name that is your own unique name, you know, you get to tell your own story. Well, I’ve spent the last 33 years basically telling someone else’s story before my own and an interesting place to be because. My family shared the same last name as the first Amelia, and my mom realized, really, and she talked my dad into it very slowly. She said, we’ve got a really unique opportunity here. Let’s name our daughter Amelia Earhart. And maybe she’ll be, you know, empowered by this name. Maybe she’ll be inspired by the first Amelia story. And my dad said, that’s a terrible idea. She’s going to feel like she has to fly, like she has to be a pilot, maybe fly around the world. And it turns out. But I did feel all those things, and there was a lot of, a lot of obligation around having a name that big. So it took me a long time to grow into it. My family is not related to Amelia. We thought for the first 31 years of my life that we were, but I, after a couple of genealogical searches, found out that I’m actually not. So then I had to rebuild and decide, okay, what am I going to make of this really famous name?

Host: You flew around the world. Other than the namesake, what was the inspiration behind the flying around the world? Or was that pretty much it?

Amelia Rose Earhart: Well, I want to be totally honest with you. It, you know, I wasn’t born… Knowing that I wanted to fly. I wasn’t a little kid that was constantly seeking out airplanes. It was definitely a lot of outside influence with the adults around me, especially as an only child. I spent a lot of time around grown up saying, well, Oh, your name is Amelia Earhart. You should learn how to fly someday. And there was, you should do this. You should do that. And so many shows and it was It was frustrating as a kid because I had all sorts of other goals that I wanted to get into and everyone just wanted to talk about flying. And so I reached the age of 21 and my family didn’t have any extra cash to give me, you know, help with school or, of course, not flight lessons. And so when I went to them and said. Look, I’ve got to figure out if flying could be for me. I said, let me take a few lessons and see if this is something I could fall in love with. And they said, well, we support you, but there’s no way we can help you out financially. So I said, I’ve got to do this. So I saved up enough money and I was waiting tables and doing a couple of jobs at a time while I was going to see you and I finally went out and took that very first flight lesson. And I don’t know what hit me. I don’t know if it was that. Push of that independence that I’ve got to do this on my own and figure out what this name is going to mean to me for the rest of my life, but something happened in that airplane. It was a single engine has no 172 in Boulder, Colorado, and I fell in love with flight. The moment those wheels lifted out the runway and I tell you, my feet have not touched the ground since. And so it truly has become my life passion. And I just, you know, I’m so grateful for that because if I would have hated it or felt sick or uncomfortable in the airplane, imagine how difficult it would be to still have this name.

Host: Oh yeah. How do you go from that to I’m going to fly around the world? That seems like a pretty big leap.

Amelia Rose Earhart: It is a pretty big leap, but it was about a 10 year leap. So the first, uh, first lesson eventually led to a lot of saving to complete my private pilot’s license. And that was a big feat for me because then I was Amelia Earhart, who can also call herself a pilot. And that almost intensified the obligation that I was feeling from others. But then granted, I was probably. Uh, you know, letting that happen a lot on my own, but people would say, Oh, well, that’s great. You’re a pilot now. Do you ever think you could fly around the world and hear everyone was saying, well, you’re a pilot. Now you should fly around the globe. And so I kept hearing that and kept hearing that. And I finally got so used to hearing it that it almost became my own language. And it, in some ways. Almost in a reverse effect. It almost frustrated me at first, and then it started to feel so good because I had this cheering squad of complete strangers. I was working in television when I started planning the flight, and it happened in 2012 when I really made that switch and said, what if I did fly around the world? What would happen next? And in my private, you know, home life, I would start to jot down, okay, if I were to do this, where would I go? And I would just, you know, have little scraps of paper laying around. This would be my route or this is why it would matter. This is maybe somebody who could help. And before I knew it, I had bits and pieces of this flight plan all over my life and no one New about it and when I started to piece those details of that flight plan together and I started to say it out loud to people who were in my friend circle and, you know, amongst my family, no one said it was a bad idea. Every single person said, you’ve already started planning this. Now you have to do it. And it became this fun challenge for me. And I saw the connection to Amelia’s legacy of all the passion and the adventure that she had in her. I also had that in me, but it really wasn’t being brought out yet. And I thought a really big, beautiful expression of that passion for adventure would be. To prove to myself to prove to everyone else who had been saying, this is a really cool story. This would get so many people excited about aviation. This would prove that there are still adventures to be had and that a woman could take the controls of an aircraft and fly all the way around the world. And in some way. First, symbolically complete the flight that Amelia set out to do in 1937 to do it 77 years later, and eventually that happened, and I’m proud to say after 2 years of planning, and I would say the equivalent of almost 2 million dollars raised to make this whole flight happen, it came together beautifully.

Host: Tell me about the $2,000,000. Talk to me about raising $2,000,000 to pull off this crazy deal.

Amelia Rose Earhart: Well, I knew that no one would support this flight if it was just the flight itself. You know, anyone can fly around the world. I knew that there had to be a really compelling story as to why I would want to do this. So before I even started raising money or trying to get sponsors on board, I decided to write out the story. Why the heck would anyone care that a new Amelia airport was flying around the world? Well, in aviation, whenever you hear a story about airplanes in the news, it’s either a crash or a disappearance or a pilot shortage, or no one’s learning to fly or aircraft are expensive or they’re breaking. I wanted to tell a good news aviation story that has not been told since Amelia Earhart’s era back in the 1930s. And I thought, let’s reinvigorate that spirit of adventure in a really public story using social media, using my GoPro cameras, using my phone, using social media to connect with people while flying around the globe in a completely modern day and connected way. So after crafting that story and saying, gosh, I’m getting more excited after I map it out. Other people will also, you know, I, heck, I didn’t have an airplane. I didn’t have any money in the bank. I said, I’m going to go tell the people who believe in me the most about this story and see if they have connection. So it was all about telling my story to anyone who would listen to it. And I started doing that. And 1 connection would say, oh, well, I know so and so who works here, or they understand the way that building an extra fuel tank might work because we had to build an extra tank to put on the plane because we couldn’t cross the Pacific Ocean without it. So there was a lot of work to be done, but that 2M dollars comes in the form of fuel, which in some countries, like Papua, New Guinea was up to 14 dollars a gallon. And the aircraft held 600 gallons of fuel, um, getting visas for 14 different countries, uh, security, getting the clearances to overfly countries through Africa, which in some cases, just across 1 country would be about 3500 dollars just to pass through their airspace, and you have to also keep in mind the amount of money that we had to have basically as a backup plan in case anything went wrong. The insurance policies around this trip were so insane. No one had ever taken a Pilatus PC 12, which is the plane that I flew, and drilled a hole through the side. No one had ever done that to put an additional fuel tank on board. So there were a lot of people to convince. This is a great story. The more momentum it built, and the more people came on board, the more, you know, new people would listen. In the end, we brought together 21 partners, and there were well over 100 people who had at least something to do with the flight. And when I look back, you know, it really was a team effort. And the story of the adventure was what kept everybody else on the outside engaged as I flew that 28,000 mile stretch.

Host: That is so wild. So where do you stop? Like how, how often do you, how many times do you stop and refuel and where and that kind of thing?

Amelia Rose Earhart: So I would fly between 7 and 10 hours a day and I traveled eastbound. So I left the United States and went down through Trinidad and Brazil and then straight across Africa, right along the equator, um, through the Seychelles, Maldives, Singapore, and then down through Australia and across the South Pacific all the way to Hawaii. And when you look at that stretch. I mean, you’ve really got to plan ahead because alternate routes or alternate landing locations, if you’re flying across an ocean with no islands and no runways, there are none. So you’ve got to have a backup for everything and the only thing that I did not have a backup for is that one engine. The propeller on the front of that plane was being driven by one single engine. And if I had an engine failure, I was going to glide down to the ocean. Hopefully set the plane down gently enough and then try to survive in a life raft until I could get rescued. And I had so much trust in that one engine on the aircraft and it was almost having that one variable that could have gone wrong. That made the trip, I think, really compelling to people who are watching from the outside. But 7 to 10 hours per day, I was traveling eastbound, so I would cross three or four time zones just in one day of flight. So I would take off at 4 a. m. and some days not land until 8 or 9 p. m. I would sleep and hop back in the plane the very next day and take off and continue the next leg. So this wasn’t a pleasure cruise. It was done in 18 days, continually moving all around the globe.

Host: You did some preparation, like some simulation for that, though.

Amelia Rose Earhart: I did. I’ve been pushed out of the helicopter into the ocean, and I know how to open up the life raft, get inside of it, use the survival gear, you know, you can actually pay to go and do this. They say, you know, when you’ve experienced something similar at least one time before, it really does increase your chance of survival because you don’t go into panic mode as quickly. It’s thrown out close to you, basically, um, and you pull a certain tab, you get it out of its, its, Really light case. You’ve got to put your feet up on a tank that is the tank that inflates the life raft. You pull that as hard as you can and push away with your feet. Meanwhile, you’re in a survival suit, which is a big rubber suit that zips all the way up to your head. The bottoms of your feet, all the air pockets that were in that suit, immediately shoot your feet up to the surface of the ocean so you can barely keep your feet down. It’s just a big, sloppy mess trying to get into that raft. And, of course, when I pulled mine open, it opened top down and it created a suction to the surface of the ocean. And this is an eight man life raft, so there’s a lot of just effort and exhaustion that people go through when they, you know, end up in these situations. And then once you get in, you’ve got a very limited survival kit and you’ve got to learn how to ration and to use every piece of material in that kit for multiple uses. In the survival kit, which I still have my survival kit from the flight around the world, as well as the raft, just in case, um, there is a certain amount of water that’s on on board the kit. You’ve got different packets of dehydrated food that are very light, but it will keep you alive. There’s, there’s a lot of little candies that have a lot of sugar to keep your brain functioning. There’s things that are really, uh, densely filled with salt. To keep you from becoming completely dehydrated. You’ve got all sorts of emergency calls that you would make while descending down. So if you had an engine failure at 30, 000 feet, you’ve got approximately 30 minutes at a glide ratio that will get you down to the ocean at the slowest rate possible to give you as much time to prepare by making emergency calls and then also mentally prepare for what’s about to happen.

Host: And then you obviously have to, like, if you’re flying around the world, the other deal is like, you have to be able to fix your own deal if something breaks.

Amelia Rose Earhart: Well, at the airport that we landed at during the flight around the world, there were people on hand who, let’s say that, you know, we had a hard landing or something catastrophic went wrong, I wouldn’t be qualified to make the, uh, the fixes to the plane, not by any means. I’m not an aircraft mechanic, so I would have had to call and help. Now, that being said, There was a very, very narrow weather window that I was allowed to fly through, you know, because we were ahead of hurricane season. You have to watch monsoon winds when you’re flying near India. Around the equator, you’re in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, which the winds, the headwinds and tailwinds can shift very rapidly. So, this time of the year, and I studied the climate data for the last hundred years to look at the best two weeks to take this flight around the world. Those 2 weeks were optimal, and if I would have waited much longer, I could have gotten stuck behind a giant typhoon that made its way across the South Pacific, which did happen right behind the flight path that I was on. And on top of that, and this is not controlled, obviously, by the climate, but there was a volcanic eruption in Papua New Guinea. Right on the day that I finished the flight just days before I was in Papua, New Guinea, there’s no way I’d want to get stuck there because they do not look too kindly on women flying airplane into their country. I would have been stuck with no way to get out of their space because the ash clouds.

Host: What do you think this whole story means for people who are not pilots?

Amelia Rose Earhart: The big takeaways from the flight around the world for me is that number one, identity, you are allowed to recreate your identity and decide who you are. Literally at any point in your life, and I had put a lot of pressure on myself around the Amelia Earhart identity because I felt like if I didn’t fly around the world, I would have left out some sort of legacy that I needed to connect to the first Amelia. But after coming back, I realized that that flight obviously was inspired by her original idea. But I know so much more about who I am by testing my strength inside of that identity. I mean, I could decide tomorrow that I want nothing to do with aviation and I want to go be a painter. And that’s totally fine. And so listening to everybody else’s, you should do this, you should do that. While it eventually led me closer towards this goal. It doesn’t mean that this has to be my trajectory for the rest of my life. And with that many hours of flight, over a hundred hours sitting in an airplane, staring at the ocean, it gave me so much time to think about that. And I want everyone to know that identity is not who you are today. It’s who you decide to be from this moment forward. And that to me was the biggest, the biggest challenge with this name, my whole life. And I feel so much more empowered now and so much free to try everything out there, not just within aviation.

Host: The courage and the risk and the trust, I mean, I was thinking about the trust in that engine. You control everything you can control, but yet at some point it still comes down to trust because you can’t control everything.

Amelia Rose Earhart: Right, and with so many parts of our goals and our plans that we put out there, there are always going to be variables. For me, the variables were the engine reliability. The variables were the weather or the people on the ground. I mean, if someone came along who didn’t support my flight and wanted to stop me, they very well could have. Those are things that I can’t waste my time stressing about, especially in the pre flight process before the flight launched. Because if I did, I would get so stuck in my head of all the reasons not to do it, but I probably wouldn’t have even gone to the variable that we can’t control, which is very similar to the aviation process and how you plan a flight. The variable, you have to take them out of your mind and only focus on the things that you do have a positive control over.

Host: Absolutely. So I have one other thing to ask you. You have a patch with you. Can you just kind of tell the story of the patch and why you keep it in your passport?

Amelia Rose Earhart: So this patch that was given to me, uh, it was given to me on the day that I launched on the flight around the world in Oakland, California. It was on June 26th. There was a big crowd that had gathered out at the airport to send me on my way. You know, planes all packed up, everyone’s ready to go and I’m in a big hurry to get out during my slot because other planes were waiting to depart. And there’s a little old man at the airport who is in a full military uniform. He’s about. 5’2 and I’m 5’10. So there was a big difference between us. Totally bald. He’s in his late 80s and he’s calling me over to him. Come over here, Amelia. Come over here. And he was kind of being held back in the crowd and I ran over to him and I said, Sir, I’m really sorry. I have to get going. And he said, Amelia. I need you to do something for me. And he just had that look like, you know, you better listen. This guy’s got something important to say. And he had two patches in his hands, identical patches with the name Amelia Earhart on them. And he handed me one and he said, you’re going to carry this all the way around the world, and I’m going to keep this one. And when you get back, we’re going to swap. And I’ll have the one that went around the globe. And I said, sure, you got it. I gave him a hug. I took the patch and I got on the airplane. I tucked it in the map pocket directly next to my left leg. And I forgot about it for 18 days and 28, 000 miles. And when I returned to Oakland after that, you know, massively stressful, amazingly beautiful, just epic flight that I had so many doubts and fears and worries about, but also so much passion behind ended that flight. Parked the airplane opened the door and got outside and of course, my mom and my dad were there and there was this big happy reunion and news news crews from all over the globe were standing there. I mean, hundreds of people came back to see the completion of the flight and there I look in the crowd and there is the same gentleman and he’s got the patch right in his hands and he’s wearing his military uniform again. And I say, Oh, my gosh, I’ve got to find that patch. Where did it go? So I look in the pocket and I grab it and I run over and I say, yeah. Sir, we made a deal. He said, yes, we did. And so we swapped patches and he had brought a civil air patrol unit with the flags from all the countries that I had flown through, which was a beautiful symbol. And he handed my mom a bouquet of roses and he pulled me in real close. I gave him a hug and I just had so much to do and so many interviews to get to. And at that moment, he leaned in very closely and he said, Amelia, there’s something that I didn’t tell you. He said, when I was a very little boy, I grew up here in Oakland, and I was in love with aviation. He said, I begged and begged and begged my parents to bring me here to Oakland Airport when I was about six years old. And I stood right here in this exact same spot, and I watched the first Amelia Earhart depart on her flight around the world. And he said, I have been waiting 77 years to see her come back to me and you just brought her home. And that is what the flight was about. It wasn’t about obligation. It wasn’t even about promoting aviation. It was about the connection to people that I will never meet who are inspired by a story of someone learning who they are. Through taking a risk and getting out and just doing their own thing, regardless of what anyone else thinks they should do and that connection and that patch is something that reminds me that I always have the choice to do what feels right for me and my journey and part of my flight path now for the rest of my life is to share that story with others so that they can get out and do their own thing, close their own circles that have open endings because that was a really beautiful moment.

Host: What a fabulous story. Thank you for who you are in your true identity and for sharing that message. We wish you the best.

Amelia Rose Earhart: Thank you, it was such a pleasure.