Earhart, Amelia

A canvas flyers helmet, label of "Faust Aircraft Equipment Corp., 1555 Roosevelt Road, Chicago," with leather chinstap with four eyelets and buckle, signed on the top by Earhart ("Amelia Earhart") and Johnson ("Amy Johnson"); with tinted goggles on elastic band, secured to the helmet with two button-snap loops at back, goggles with label of "E. B. Meyrowitz … Manufactures of Luxor Goggles," signed on elastic band by Davenport ("Novetah")

Noveteh Davenport — by descent through the family to the present owner 

Novetah Davenport was an early pilot who became an executive in the aircraft industry. She received her pilot's license in 1930 and became active in the Association of International Women Pilots, a group founded by Amelia Earhart, who became her close friend. Earhart, of course, was the archetypal pioneering woman pilot, who disappeared in 1937 while attempting a circumnavigational flight of the earth.

Amy Johnson was Britain's most famous early woman pilot. Johnson trained at the London Aeroplane Club in the winter of 1928-29. She was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia and also the first woman to qualify as a ground engineer. Like Earhart, she died while flying, crashing into the Thames estuary in January 1941 while flying for the Air Transport Auxillary.

Unlike her two contemporaries, Novetah Davenport had a long career and long life, even earning a hot-air ballooning license at the age of 60. She had signed her own helmet as a means of identification, and at some later point, perhaps at a meeting of the International Women Pilots, she had her two illustrious colleagues add their signatures. As a relic of the earliest days of women's participation in aviation, this helmet must be virtually without peer.