Amelia Earhart, 1936: the famous landing the record supports

1936

The airport authority's own history records the visit: "Amelia Earhart in 1936 when she landed her Lockheed Electra aircraft at Bendix field" — the sentence stands on the St. Joseph County Airport Authority's history page, and this record prints it as the authority's statement. The documented record of Earhart's own 1936 reached for this section does not independently place her at South Bend: her late-August and September 1936 movements in the record run from Burbank to Kansas City on 29 August, to Cleveland on 30 August, to Floyd Bennett Field on 31 August, and to Purdue University by 20 September, and on 4 September 1936 she flew the Bendix Trophy Race from New York to Los Angeles in the Electra, finishing fifth with co-pilot Helen Richey — the race named for the same Vincent Bendix whose field this was. A South Bend stop on one of those cross-country passages is entirely possible; it is simply not corroborated in the sources reached here, and so it is printed as the airport tells it, attributed, with the gap named beside it. The authority's page also lists the presidents who have landed at the field — Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump — and that list is printed, likewise, as the airport's own record of its visitors.

Sources:

1. St. Joseph County Airport Authority, "History" (flysbn.com) — Earhart's 1936 Electra landing at Bendix Field and the list of presidents who have landed at the airport.
2. The 1936 National Air Races record (airrace.com) — Earhart and Helen Richey, fifth place, New York–Los Angeles Bendix Trophy Race, 4 September 1936, in the Lockheed Electra; and the documented record of her August–September 1936 movements (Burbank–Kansas City 29 August; Cleveland 30 August; Floyd Bennett Field 31 August; Purdue 20 September).