Fred Noonan

Frederick Joseph Noonan was born on April 4, 1893 in Cook County (Chicago), Illinois to Joseph T Noonan and Catherine Egan. His mother died when he was four, and three years later a census report lists him as living alone in a Chicago boarding house, although it's likely that relatives or family friends were caring for him. In his own words, he "left school in summer of 1905 and went to Seattle, Washington", where he found work as a seaman.

Sometime later he shipped out of Seattle on a sailing bark as an ordinary seaman. Between 1910 and 1915 he worked on over a dozen ships, rising to the ratings of Quartermaster and Boson's Mate. He continued working on merchant ships throughout the First World War and by 1919 had achieved some respectability as a ship's officer. Throughout the 1920s his maritime career was characterized by steadily increasing ratings and "good" (typically the highest) work performance reviews. Noonan married Josephine Sullivan in 1927 at Jackson, Mississippi. After a honeymoon in Cuba they settled in New Orleans.

In 1930 Noonan received a "limited commercial pilot's license", listing his occupation as 'aviator'. In 1931 he was awarded "license #121190, Class Master, any ocean", the qualifications of a ship's captain. During the early 1930s he worked as an instructor in Miami and an airport manager for Pan Am in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.

In March 1935, Noonan was navigator on the first Pan Am clipper at San Francisco Bay. In April, he navigated the historic, round-trip China Clipper flight between San Francisco and Honolulu, piloted by Ed Musick (who was featured on the cover of Time magazine that year). Noonan was subsequently responsible for mapping Pan Am's clipper routes across the Pacific, participating in many flights to Midway and Wake Island, Guam, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. Interestingly, in addition to carrying more modern navigational tools, the licensed sea captain was known for carrying a ship's sextant on these flights.

1937 was a year of transition for Fred Noonan, whose reputation as an expert navigator, along with his role in the development of commercial airline navigation, had already earned him a place in aviation history. The tall, very thin, brown-haired and blue-eyed forty-three year old navigator was living in Los Angeles. He resigned from Pan Am because he felt he had risen through the ranks as far as he could as a navigator, and had interest in starting a navigation school. In March he obtained a divorce from his wife Josie in Juarez, Mexico. A short time later he married Mary Bea Martinelli (of Oakland, California). Noonan was rumored to be a heavy drinker, but this was fairly common during the era and there is no evidence it ever interfered with his reliability or accuracy as a navigator.

Amelia Earhart met Noonan through mutual connections in the Los Angeles aviation community and chose him to serve as her navigator on her World Flight in the Lockheed Electra 10E, a circumnavigation of the globe at equatorial latitudes funded in part by Purdue University. Although the aircraft was of an advanced type and dubbed a "flying laboratory" for the press, little real science was planned, the world was already criss-crossed with commercial airline routes (many of which Noonan himself had first navigated and mapped) and the flight is now widely regarded as an adventurous publicity stunt. Noonan was probably attracted to the project because Earhart's mass market fame would almost certainly generate huge publicity, which in turn could reasonably be expected to attract attention to him and the navigation school he hoped to establish when they returned.

The first attempt began with a record-breaking flight from Burbank, California to Honolulu. However, as the plane was taking off to begin the second leg to Howland Island, its wing clipped the ground, Earhart cut an engine to maintain balance, the plane looped and the landing gear collapsed. Although there were no injuries the Electra had to be shipped back to Los Angeles for expensive repairs. Over a month later they tried again, this time leaving California in the opposite direction.

Earhart characterized the pace of their forty day, eastward trip from Burbank to New Guinea as "leisurely". They took off from Lae on July 2, 1937, and headed for Howland Island, a tiny sliver of land in the Pacific Ocean, barely 2000 meters long. The plan for the eighteen hour flight was to reach the vicinity of Howland using Noonan's celestial navigation skills, then find the island using radio navigation signals sent by the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca. Through a series of misunderstandings or mishaps (which are still controversial), over scattered clouds, the final approach was never accomplished, although Earhart indicated by radio that they believed they were in the immediate vicinity of Howland. Two-way radio contact was never established and the fliers disappeared over the western Pacific. Despite an unprecedented search by the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, no physical evidence was found.

Later research showed that Howland's position was misplaced on their chart by approximately five nautical miles. There is also motion picture evidence that a belly antenna on the Electra may have snapped on take off (the purpose of this antenna has not been identified and radio communications seemed normal as they climbed away from Lae).

It's quite possible, even likely, that having run out of fuel, Earhart ditched the Electra in the ocean where she perished with her navigator. However, in her last message received at Howland, Earhart reported that they were flying a standard line of position (or sun line), a routine procedure for an experienced navigator like Noonan. This line passed within sight of Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro) in the Phoenix Group to the southeast, and there is a range of documented and anecdotal evidence (but no proof) indicating that Earhart and Noonan found Gardner, which at the time was uninhabited, landed the Electra on a flat reef near the wreck of a large freighter, and sent sporadic radio messages from there. Other evidence indicates Noonan may have succumbed to either injuries or exposure rather quickly, while Earhart may have survived as a castaway for a period of months. For example, in 1940 a British colonial officer (also a licensed pilot) radioed his superiors to inform them that he believed he had found Earhart's skeleton, along with a sextant box, under a tree on the island's southeast corner.