101-Year-Old Woman Who Flew With Amelia Earhart Takes to Sky Again

“It was so noisy that you couldn’t talk in the airplane,” Fiyalka said. “I’ll never forget taxiing in the airplane, and then the wheels left the earth.”

The flight was short, circling a few local landmarks before returning to the airport. Then Fiyalka and her fellow students said their goodbyes to Earhart. Less than eight months later, on July 2, 1937, Earhart’s plane disappeared over the Pacific Ocean during an around-the-world flight attempt, with Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan on board. It has never been found.

An intense search for the plane went on for weeks and was the subject of worldwide news coverage. But Fiyalka didn’t hear about Earhart’s disappearance right away.

“In those days, we didn’t have a newspaper,” Fiyalka said. Days passed before she learned the news. “Once I found out about it, I was very anxious to find out more about the expedition,” she said.

Anne Fiyalka, 101, sits in a Lockheed Electra at the New England Air Museum in April 2022.

Wish of a Lifetime from AARP (Keith Claytor – Time Frozen Photography)

Earhart and her navigator were declared lost at sea on July 19, 1937, and she was officially declared dead Jan. 5, 1939. The 125th anniversary of Earhart’s birth was July 24, 2022, and her hometown of Atchison, Kansas, hosts a festival in her honor around her birthday every year.

Centenarian gets wish to fly again

Through the decades that followed, Fiyalka never forgot her trip with the famous aviator, occasionally recalling the story to friends and at social events. Last year, Fiyalka’s neighbor and longtime friend Cheryl Constand saw an item in AARP The Magazine that made her think immediately of Fiyalka.

Wish of a Lifetime From AARP, a group dedicated to shifting how society views older generations, was seeking nominations to fulfill the wishes of centenarians. Constand went through the process to nominate Fiyalka. Wish of a Lifetime granted the request to re-create the Earhart flight for Fiyalka, and also arranged for her to receive a guided tour of the New England Air Museum in East Granby, Connecticut.

“I just thought it was more than deserved, and I knew how much it would please her,” Constand said at the time of Fiyalka’s wish. “She’s 101 and has such a unique personality. Young and old love her and like to be with her.”

On June 24, 2022, Fiyalka got into a turboprop plane at Sikorsky Memorial Airport in Stratford, Connecticut, and flew once more, covering some of the same territory she saw on the Earhart flight. “I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the recent flight,” she said. “We were flying at only 3,000 feet, and so the pilot could point out special places of interest in Easton.” That included schools, a reservoir and the nearby coastline.

“I found it really interesting to see the land from the plane again,” she said. And she remembered Earhart’s words to her high school assembly, which were a direct challenge to the norms of the time — that it was a woman’s world as well as a man’s.​

​One incredible story at a time, Wish of a Lifetime From AARP is changing the perception of aging — not just how we view older adults, but also how we see and value ourselves as we age. Follow @wishofalifetime on Facebook for more inspiring stories like Anne’s.​