Amelia Earhart the aircraft came close. "I did not understand it at the time," she said, "but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by." By 1919 Earhart prepared to enter Smith College but changed her mind and enrolled at Columbia University, in a course in medical studies among other programs. She quit a year later to be with her parents, who had reunited in California. In Long Beach, on December 28, 1920, Earhart and her father visited an airfield where Frank Hawks (who later gained fame as an air racer) gave her a ride that
Amelia Earhart the flight was arranged around Earhart's intention to circumnavigate the globe along with gathering raw material and public attention for her next book. Earhart chose Captain Harry Manning as her navigator; he had been the captain of the , the ship that had brought Earhart back from Europe in 1928. Manning was not only a navigator, but he was also a skilled radio operator who knew Morse code. Through contacts in the Los Angeles aviation community, Fred Noonan was subsequently chosen as a second navigator because there were significant additional factors that had to be dealt with while using celestial