In her early childhood, Amelia Earhart’s parents took her to an aviation show and paid a dollar to a pilot to take young Amelia up in the air for 10 minutes. That was all the motivation she needed: “By the time I had gotten two or three hundred feet off the ground,” she wrote, “I knew I had to fly.” Despite aviation being a predominantly male field, Earhart wanted to make her mark. Of course she knew just how.

On this day, August 24, in 1932, just two months after her solo transatlantic flight, “Lady Lindy” Amelia Earhart flew a Lockheed Vega from Los Angeles, California, to Newark, New Jersey, becoming the first woman to fly solo coast-to-coast. She also set a record time for the flight: 19 hours, 5 minutes.

Three years later, Earhart flew from the West Coast to Hawaii, a trip made somewhat easier by better navigational charts and instruments, but still the equivalent of finding a needle in the haystack of the Pacific Ocean. By 1937 Earhart was ready for her grand finale: a flight around the world. Earhart never completed it, disappearing midway, but before she left she told the press “I have a feeling there is just about one more good flight left in my system and I hope this trip is it. Anyway, when I have finished this job, I mean to give up long-distance ‘stunt’ flying.”