Thirty years to the day after Amelia Earhart embarked on her unsuccessful flight, a female pilot from Michigan successfully completed it for her.
Ann Pellegreno was her name, and in the summer of 1967, she flew the exact same route that Earhart did in the same type of plane on the same dates and with most of the same refueling stops.
It was dubbed the “Amelia Earhart Commemorative Flight,” and Pellegreno did it to honor her idol. When she returned, she was hailed as an international hero and honored with a huge parade in her hometown of Saline.
Pellegreno had less than 1,000 hours of flight experience when she began the trip. Pellegreno, who is now 87 years old and lives in Texas, continues to speak about the flight that made her famous.
“I would say (to Earhart) that I truly believe you were there when I made my flight,” she said in 2023.
Pellegreno was born in 1937, the year of Earhart’s ill-fated flight, and grew up in Chicago. She moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan, where she majored in music and graduated in 1958. She met her husband, Don, in the U‑M Concert Band and took a job as an English teacher at Saline Junior High School after graduation.
She caught the flying bug in 1961 and earned her private pilot’s license. In 1966, she earned her commercial pilot’s license and gave up teaching to become a full-time pilot.
About that time, she met an aircraft mechanic from Ypsilanti named Leo Koepke who had recently purchased and restored a 1937 Lockheed 10 Electra, the same plane Earhart had flown.
It was Koepke who put the bug in Pellegreno’s ear: You need to complete Amelia Earhart’s flight for her.
It took some convincing, but Pellegreno eventually agreed to try. Unlike Earhart, who had started the trip with only one navigator on her crew, Pellegreno decided she needed three other crew members. Koepke would serve as the mechanic, William Polhemus of Ann Arbor would be her navigator, and an Air Force colonel from Virginia named William Payne would serve as her copilot.
