Captain Beverly Lynn Burns is the first woman to captain the Boeing 747 jumbo jet. On the afternoon of July 18, 1984, Burns made her maiden voyage as Captain when she commanded People Express aircraft 604 from Newark International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport.

By the time she retired, in February 2008, she had been a captain with the airlines for twenty-seven years and amassed over twenty-five thousand hours of flight time. While with People Express she captained the Boeing 727, Boeing 737 and Boeing 747. Between the time the company merged with Continental Airlines in 1987 and the onset of the 2000 millennium, she added the DC-9, DC-10, Boeing 757 and Boeing 767 to the list of jetliners she had captained. Then, in May 2001, Burns became captain on one of the most technologically sophisticated airliners of its time, the Boeing 777.

In addition to her qualifications on the flight deck, Burns had acquired an understanding of the airlines as a business. From 1971 to 1978, she worked as stewardess for American Airlines while attending flight school. In 1978, she held positions as a flight instructor and charter pilot for Hinson Airways. The following year, she flew as captain for Allegheny Commuter until 1981, when she went to work for People Express.

Amelia Mary Earhart (/ˈɛərhɑrt/ AIR-hart; July 24, 1897 – disappeared 1937) was a noted American aviation pioneer and author. Earhart was the first woman to receive the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross, awarded for becoming the first aviatrix to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots. Earhart joined the faculty of the Purdue University aviation department in 1935 as a visiting faculty member to counsel women on careers and help inspire others with her love for aviation. She was also a member of the National Woman's Party, and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.

During an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937 in a Purdue-funded Lockheed Model 10 Electra, Earhart disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island. Fascination with her life, career and disappearance continues to this day.

Lynn Rachel Redgrave, OBE (8 March 1943 – 2 May 2010) was an English actress.

A member of the well-known British acting family, Redgrave trained in London before making her theatrical debut in 1962. By the mid-1960s she had appeared in several films, including Tom Jones (1963), and Georgy Girl (1966) which won her a New York Film Critics Award and nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award.

In 1967, she made her Broadway debut, and performed in several stage productions in New York while making frequent returns to London's West End. She performed with her sister Vanessa in Three Sisters in London, and in the title role in a television production of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1991. She made a return to films in the late 1990s in films such as Shine (1996) and Gods and Monsters (1998), for which she received another Academy Award nomination.

Redgrave was born in Marylebone, London, to actors Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson. Her sister is actress Vanessa Redgrave; her brother is the late actor and political activist Corin Redgrave. She is the aunt of actor Carlo Gabriel Nero and actresses Joely Richardson, Jemma Redgrave and the late Natasha Richardson.

Professor Jenny Williams is an author and academic at Dublin City University. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in German from Queen's University Belfast in 1974 and a PhD in Medieval Historiography and Heroic Literature in 1979. Until 2007 she was the head of Dublin City's School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies.

Books by Jenny Williams include:

Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns (born July 29, 1953) is an American director and producer of documentary films, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs. Among his productions are The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009) and Prohibition (2011).

Burns' documentaries have been nominated for two Academy Awards, and have won Emmy Awards, among other honors.

Ken Burns was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, according to his official website, though some sources give Ann Arbor, Michigan, and some, including The New York Times, give both Brooklyn and Ann Arbor. The son of Lyla Smith (née Tupper) Burns, a biotechnician, and Robert Kyle Burns, at the time a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Columbia University, in Manhattan. Ken Burns' brother is the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns.

Burns' academic family moved frequently, and lived in Saint-Véran, France; Newark, Delaware; and Ann Arbor, where his father taught at the University of Michigan. Burns' mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when Burns was 3, and died when he was 11, a circumstance that he said helped shape his career; he credited his father-in-law, a psychologist, with a signal insight: "He told me that my whole work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive.". Well-read as a child, he absorbed the family encyclopedia, preferring history to fiction. Upon receiving an 8 mm film movie camera for his 17th birthday, he shot a documentary about an Ann Arbor factory. Turning down reduced tuition at the University of Michigan, he attended the new Hampshire College, an alternative school in Amherst, Massachusetts with narrative evaluations rather than letter grades and self-directed academic concentrations instead of traditional majors. He worked in a record store to pay his tuition.