The Ninety-Nines: Amelia Earhart's Club
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
In November of nineteen twenty-nine, twenty-six licensed women pilots met at Curtiss Field on Long Island and founded an organization to promote women in aviation. They named it for their ninety-nine charter members: the Ninety-Nines. Amelia Earhart served as the group's first elected president in nineteen thirty-one, lending the organization international visibility. The inspiration had come that summer from the National Women's Air Derby , the first transcontinental air race for women, which humorist Will Rogers nicknamed the Powder Puff Derby.
The organization moved its international headquarters to Oklahoma City in nineteen fifty-five, settling at Will Rogers World Airport, and in nineteen ninety-nine opened the Ninety-Nines Museum of Women Pilots here. The museum preserves flight suits, logbooks, aircraft models, and records documenting women's contributions to aviation from the biplane era through the space age. Today the Ninety-Nines has members in countries around the world. The museum is one of a small number of institutions dedicated to the history of women in aviation.
