36 Facts About Fred Noonan

At the age of 17, Fred Noonan shipped out of Seattle as an ordinary seaman on a British sailing bark, the Crompton.

Between 1910 and 1915, Fred Noonan worked on over a dozen ships, rising to the ratings of quartermaster and bosun's mate.

Fred Noonan continued working on merchant ships throughout the war.

Fred Noonan's career moving ahead, 34 year old Noonan married Josephine Sullivan in 1927 in Jackson, Mississippi.

Fred Noonan was the navigator on the first Pan Am Sikorsky S-42 clipper at San Francisco Bay.

Fred Noonan was responsible for mapping Pan Am's clipper routes across the Pacific Ocean, participating in many flights to Midway Island, Wake Island, Guam, the Philippines, and Hong Kong.

Fred Noonan made at least twenty-one flights for Pan American in 1936, including numerous, often lengthy, test hops and five round-trip Pacific crossings to Manila.

Fred Noonan resigned from Pan Am because he felt he had risen through the ranks as far as he could as a navigator, and he had an interest in starting a navigation school.

Around this time Fred Noonan was involved in a serious automobile accident.

Fred Noonan fell in love with Mary Beatrice Martinelli, herself a divorcee with no children, who ran a beauty salon in Oakland, California.

References in his own correspondence make it clear that Fred Noonan enjoyed an occasional drink, and it is possible that he sometimes overindulged but there is no contemporary evidence Fred Noonan was an alcoholic or was fired by Pan American for drinking, although decades later, a few writers and others made some hearsay claims that he was.

Fred Noonan planned to circumnavigate the globe at equatorial latitudes.

Fred Noonan had recently left Pan American Airways and was available to help out.

Fred Noonan was probably attracted to this project because Earhart's mass market fame would almost certainly generate considerable publicity, which in turn might reasonably be expected to attract attention to him and the navigation school that he hoped to establish when they returned.

Fred Noonan did not have the necessary visa to accompany the flight as far as New Guinea, but his skills in aeronautical-celestial and dead-reckoning navigation were most needed for the flight from Hawaii to Howland Island, a tiny sliver of land in the Pacific Ocean, barely 2,000 meters long.

Fred Noonan would leave the flight at Howland and return to Honolulu aboard the US Coast Guard cutter Shoshone.

On March 13,1937, Fred Noonan's name appeared for the first time in the press as a member of Earhart's crew.

Fred Noonan remedied that by borrowing a modern bubble octant designed especially for airplane navigation.

Fred Noonan maintained a post office box address in Hollywood, and a business directory published later that year lists a residence address in Los Angeles.

Three days later, Earhart and Fred Noonan arrived in Florida, having completed the Electra's cross-country test flight.

In Miami, Fred Noonan took the opportunity to renew his acquaintance with Helen Day, a young woman he had met when he worked for Pan American's Caribbean Division.

Fred Noonan wrote to Day at least four times during the world flight.

Over one month later, Earhart and Fred Noonan began the second world flight attempt, this time leaving California in the opposite direction.

Contrary to belief, Fred Noonan was not confined to the navigator's station in the rear cabin and able to communicate with Earhart only in notes passed forward over the fuel tanks by means of a bamboo pole, he spent much of his time in the cockpit with Earhart, clambering over the fuel tanks into the rear cabin only when he needed room to spread out a chart or use the lavatory, though they did communicate primarily in writing, due to the noise of the engines.

The strength of the transmissions received indicated that Earhart and Fred Noonan were indeed in the vicinity of Howland island, but could not find it and after numerous more attempts it appeared that the connection had dropped.

The last transmission received from Earhart indicated she and Fred Noonan were flying along a line of position which Fred Noonan would have calculated and drawn on a chart as passing through Howland.

However, this theory is based entirely on supposition and misunderstanding of astronomy; it does not offer any evidence Fred Noonan was impacted by or failed to adequately account for the 24-hour variance in his sun line calculations, and was reportedly debunked by an experienced navigator on a TIGHAR forum.

The US Navy concluded that the Electra had run out of fuel and Earhart and Fred Noonan ditched at sea and perished.

Fred Noonan's theory is based on an error in Noonan's position when he took his sun line of position.

TIGHAR theorises that Earhart, and possibly Fred Noonan, may have tried to survive on the island before perishing as castaways, just before a British exploratory expedition visited Gardner Island in October 1937, just three months after the disappearance.

David W Jourdan refutes the theory that Earhart and Noonan landed on Gardner Island, claiming that any transmissions attributed to Gardner Island were false.

Fred Noonan was portrayed by actor David Graf in "The 37s", an episode of Star Trek: Voyager.

The character of an aircraft pilot named Fred Noonan is portrayed by actor Eddie Firestone in The Long Train, a 1961 episode of the television series The Untouchables.

Fred Noonan is mentioned in the song "Amelia" on Bell X1's 2009 album Blue Lights on the Runway, which contemplates the last moments and the fates of Amelia Earhart and Noonan.

The first ballad written about Amelia and Fred Noonan was written and sung by "Red River" Dave McEnerney in 1938 called "Amelia Earhart's Last Flight".

Fred Noonan is a main character in Jane Mendelsohn's novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, and in Neal Bowers' poem "The Fred Noonan Variations".