Fred Noonan
Navigator · 1893–presumed 2 July 1937 (declared dead 1938)
Who is Fred Noonan?
Fred Noonan was an American ship's officer and aviator who became one of the most experienced marine and aerial navigators of his era. Born in Chicago, he first went to sea as a teenager, working aboard sailing ships before rising to ship's officer and studying celestial and dead-reckoning navigation. In the 1930s he joined Pan American Airways, where he helped survey and navigate the airline's new transpacific Clipper flying-boat routes, including pioneering Pacific crossings to Hawaii, Midway, Wake, Guam, and the Philippines. His deep familiarity with long-range over-water navigation across the central Pacific led Amelia Earhart to select him as navigator for her 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe by air. On 2 July 1937, Noonan was aboard Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E on the flight's most demanding leg, a roughly 2,500-mile crossing of open ocean toward tiny Howland Island, part of today's U.S. Minor Outlying Islands, where the pair intended to refuel. The aircraft never arrived; a series of increasingly urgent radio transmissions from Earhart to the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, stationed off Howland to guide them in, ended abruptly, and no confirmed trace of Noonan, Earhart, or the aircraft was ever found despite an extensive U.S. Navy and Coast Guard search.
Sources: Mary S. Lovell, The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia Earhart (1989) · U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca radio logs, 2 July 1937 · Fred Noonan, letters, quoted in published historical accounts of the Earhart-Noonan world flight