Catching Up With Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart, the former traffic reporter for KUSA 9News, has seen a lot since 2014 when she sought to emulate the aviation accomplishments of the early 20th-century aviatrix whose name she shares, Amelia Earhart.

The modern-day Earhart grew up near Colorado Springs and helped pay for flight lessons and school tuition by working at golf courses around the Springs. She went into TV news work after leaving college, eventually becoming a traffic and weather reporter for KUSA.

In 2014 Earhart left her job at KUSA and embarked on a hugely publicized and funded effort to fly around the world. This was intended to emulate the trip the early 20th-century pilot Amelia Earhart was undertaking when she, her plane and co-pilot disappeared in 1937. Sponsors of the latter-day Earhart’s $2 million trip included Boeing and its subsidiary Jeppesen.

The flight for Denver’s Earhart succeeded and she was credited as being the second-youngest woman to fly around the globe in a single-engine plane. She made the journey with a co-pilot, Shane Jordan. But the publicity around it forced into the open a long-simmering question about Earhart’s life. She says she had been told by her parents growing up that she was distantly related to the famous aviatrix, a connection she came to embrace. She says it was her name that led her to her interest in aviation.

As her flight approached she continually was asked – ‘how are you related to the other Amelia Earhart.’ In 2004 she says she hired a genealogist to dig into the records, and that woman returned to her with the same conclusion: she was ‘distantly’ related to Earhart but that further research going back to records in Europe would be necessary to find out exactly how. Earhart says now she erred in not digging further.

Denver’s Earhart says she tried to be clear with anyone who asked, based on that information. She said she believed the two were distantly related, but it wasn’t clear how.

But the questions continued. After doing some research of his own, her former co-worker, KUSA anchor Kyle Clark, posted on his social media accounts that he had looked into the matter himself and concluded there was no evidence that the two were related. Another genealogical review concluded the same. “While my family and Amelia’s were living in adjacent (Pennsylvania) counties, we merely shared a last name,” Earhart wrote in her 2023 book ‘Learn to Love the Turbulence.’ “We were not related.”

When the news came out, before her flight, some took to social media and emails to call her a fraud, claiming she was trying to profit from her famous name. How she came through this period, and what she learned, is now part of Earhart’s self-published book “Learn to Love The Turbulence.”Her main point: “Life is going to be unexpected and turbulent,” she said over coffee recently.

She has expanded her story into a talk that she delivers at corporate retreats and conventions. Beginning in 2020 she began marketing her story, and now considers herself a full-time public speaker and pilot. She has no plans to return to TV work, she said. “I’ve been growing my keynote speech for 10 years,” she said. “Re-working and re-vamping. I try to make it so that listeners hear ‘Here’s what it means for you.’ I hope it goes for another 10 to 20 years.”

Now living in the DTC area of Denver, she is growing her public-speaking career, painting, and trying to save for her first home and her first plane. “Learn to Love The Turbulence” by Amelia Rose Earhart and co-author Kristin Clark Taylor is available through Amazon.