Amelia Rose Earhart is an American private pilot and reporter for NBC affiliate KUSA-TV in Denver, Colorado, where she resides. In 2013 Earhart started the Fly With Amelia Foundation, which grants flight scholarships to girls aged 16–18. Earhart was told by family members in her youth that she was a descendant of Amelia Mary Earhart. When she was in college, she hired a genealogist to research her connection to Amelia Earhart. That genealogist told her that she and Amelia shared a "distant common ancestry traced back to the 1700s", however, a second genealogical search in 2013 found there was no traceable connection. Earhart took her first flying lesson on June 2, 2004, and obtained her private pilot certificate in a Cessna 172. In December 2011, she recreated her namesake's transcontinental flight from Oakland, California to Miami, Florida in a Cirrus SR22, as a completion of her instrument training hours. In July 2013 she was awarded the Amelia Earhart Pioneering Achievement Award by the Atchison, Kansas Chamber of Commerce. The award is given to the woman who carries on Amelia Earhart's spirit. In partnership with Denver's Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, Earhart completed a circumnavigation of the globe in a single-engine airplane with her copilot, Shane Jordan. Her route was to fly across the US, then south into the Caribbean, northeast Brazil, the South Atlantic Ocean, then the African continent, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Islands, and the Pacific Ocean before returning to California. Earhart and Jordan started the global circumnavigation flight on June 26, 2014, departing Oakland, California at 8:19 am Pacific Standard Time in a single engine Pilatus PC-12 NG. They made 17 stops during the 24,300 nautical-mile trip over 108 flying hours, landing back in Oakland without incident on July 11, 2014. On July 9, as she and Jordan were flying over Howland Island she announced, via Twitter, the names of the first recipients of the Fly With Amelia Foundation flight training scholarships. Although widely reported to have become the youngest woman to fly around the world, she is in fact the second youngest behind Richarda Morrow-Tait, who was also the first woman to pilot a plane around the globe.
