Aptitude, trial and error, practicality, fun: such were the tenets of her proclaimed philosophy for living. For the girl who initially had accidentally become a heroine of flight, then had to prove it to herself, and for the rest of her life to the world who acclaimed her, it was the only possible philosophy.
Although she forgot to mention it, there was in her life, in addition to the necessity of fun for work, much work in her fun. And despite the fact that her practical self would never admit it, she was also a romantic and a visionary. Like the skylark and the nightingale of Shelley and Keats, she was a blithe spirit and a light-winged dryad, who soared on the wind and pranked the starlight sky. Without her dreams she could not live in the wide-awake world.
Like Henry David Thoreau, the famed mystic of Walden Pond, she could say:
I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond the range of sight,
New earth and skies and seas around.
There was fitful restlessness in the way Amelia had skipped from job to job and interest to interest on the ground, the ground in which her soaring ambition could never take root. It was only in the air that she found the repose and the leisure to probe the depths of her own soul, to come to a sustaining knowledge of herself.
Dr. Elliott was pleased with her work. So was the Purdue Research Foundation, which set up an Amelia Earhart Fund for the purchase of a plane that she could use experimentally at her own discretion.
AE, despite a deep interest in the engineering and mechanical aspects of flight, wanted to study the human elements involved—“the effects of flying on people.” She had named herself as the first guinea pig.
Early in 1936 enough funds were declared available for her to make her choice of airplanes. Amelia picked a new twin-engined ten-passenger Lockheed Electra transport plane. It was what she had wanted for a long time: a bigger, safer airplane.