Lindbergh flew 3,600 miles from New York to Paris in The Spirit of St Louis. The journey earned him not only enormous fame but also the $25,000 Orteig Prize that had been offered by a French-born New York hotelier to the first person to make a non-stop flight between New York and Paris.
Earhart’s flight from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland took her as far as Northern Ireland. She was forced to abandon her intended destination of Paris due to technical difficulties and landed in a pasture at Culmore, north of Derry. Earhart was met by farmhand Dan McCallion who asked if she had flown far. She reportedly replied, ‘From America.’
Earhart later stated that she made the flight to prove that women were just as good as men in ‘jobs requiring intelligence, coordination, speed, coolness, and willpower’. She already held the record as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, but she did that as a passenger in 1928.
The very first non-stop transatlantic flight had occurred in 1919. Two British aviators, John Alcock and Arthur Whiten Brown, flew a modified Vickers Vimy bomber aircraft from Newfoundland to Ireland in just under 16 hours. Their achievement won them the £10,000 Daily Mail aviation prize for the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. Their prize was presented to them by the then Secretary of State for Air, and future British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
