Amelia earhart: Who was she? By

By the late 1920s Noonan had decided on a career change, and received a limited commercial pilot's license in 1930. That same year, he had also gone to work for Pan American and was made airport manager at Port Au Prince, Haiti. Later, Noonan was made inspector of all of Pan American’s airports. In 1931, Noonan was granted master’s papers, which qualified him to be the captain of a merchant marine ship. During the early to mid 1930s, Noonan was chief navigator for Pan American and mapped all the aerial routes in the Pacific Ocean for the famed Pan American Clipper flights.

By December 1936, when Noonan met Amelia Earhart, he was reported by some sources to have been discharged by Pan American for heavy drinking, and by other sources to have resigned his job because he felt he had gone as far as he could with Pan American. He was a man at the crossroads of his life and a flight with Amelia Earhart represented pretty much his last chance in aerial navigation. Initially, Noonan’s reputation for drinking disturbed and alarmed Earhart, who did not want to take Noonan on as a navigator. It was at the urging of her husband G.P. Putnam and technical advisor Paul Mantz that Earhart reluctantly agreed to take on Noonan as back-up navigator. Both Putnam and Mantz felt that Noonan’s much vaunted expertise in aerial navigation was important for the flight, as Harry Manning, who had already been designated principal navigator, was only qualified in nautical navigation. After Earhart’s crash at Luke Field in March 1937, Manning backed out of the flight, leaving Noonan as principal navigator. Oddly, by then, positions were reversed. G.P. and Mantz both wanted Noonan to be let go, and Earhart wanted to keep Noonan. Earhart prevailed. She was not gong to be the one to foreclose Fred Noonan’s last chance at a career in navigation.

A casual shot of Fred Noonan

Colorization by David K. Bowman