Amelia Earhart became a pilot because she spent a year as a nurse's aide. The men she was nursing were airmen, and the hospital was next to an aerodrome.
Toronto, 1918
Earhart was twenty and at school in Pennsylvania when she visited her sister in Toronto over Christmas 1917 and saw four wounded soldiers on the street, on crutches. Canada had been at war for three years; the United States had been in it for months and had sent nobody home yet.
She did not go back to school. In February 1918 she joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment and went to work at the Spadina Military Convalescent Hospital.
VAD volunteers got a few days of Red Cross first aid instruction and then did whatever the ward needed. Earhart scrubbed floors, carried trays, worked long shifts in the kitchen, and — because it was the closest thing to real clinical work available to her — spent a good deal of time in the dispensary handing out medication. She worked until the small hours during the worst of it.
The influenza
The 1918 pandemic reached Toronto in the autumn and the hospital filled.
Earhart caught it. She developed pneumonia and then a severe maxillary sinus infection, which in the era before antibiotics was treated by washing the sinus out through an incision. She was hospitalised for weeks and spent about a year convalescing at her sister's house in Northampton, Massachusetts.
The sinus trouble never went away. She had further operations and the headaches recurred for the rest of her life, including in the cockpit — an open-cockpit aeroplane at altitude is close to the worst environment for it.
The aerodrome
Many of the men at Spadina were British and Canadian flying officers under training at nearby airfields. Earhart and her sister started going out to watch them fly.
She described her first sight of it as being pinned in place by the noise and the machine. She had seen an aeroplane before, at a state fair at ten, and had been unimpressed. This time she was standing in a field when a pilot spotted the two women and dived at them for a joke.
I did not understand it at the time, but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by.
She took her first flight in California in December 1920, and started lessons the following week.
Related
Sources
- Amelia Earhart in Toronto. Defining Moments Canada. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Amelia Earhart biographical sketch. Purdue University Libraries, which hold her papers. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Amelia Earhart, volunteer nurse, on her VAD service at Spadina Military Convalescent Hospital. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- 20 Hrs., 40 Min., Amelia Earhart, 1928. Accessed September 9, 2026.