Frederick Joseph Noonan (born April 4, 1893 – disappeared July 2, 1937, declared dead June 20, 1938) was an American flight navigator, sea captain and aviation pioneer, who first charted many commercial airline routes across the Pacific Ocean during the 1930s.

[2] As the flight navigator for famed aviator Amelia Earhart in their pioneering attempt at circumnavigating the globe, they disappeared somewhere over the central Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937.

In his own words, Noonan "left school in summer of 1905 and went to Seattle, Washington,"[4] where he was a seaman at an early age, serving in a succession of merchant ships and steadily advancing in his ratings and certifications.

Adapting his maritime navigational expertise to aviation, Fred was instrumental in developing techniques for the company's nascent Pacific Division.

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), its course set by Noonan.

He 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.

In a 1939 book by Pan Am pilot William Grooch, who reported something of a rebellion among the airline's flight crews following the trip, Noonan said, "We've lived on promises for a year.

The tall, very thin, dark auburn-haired and blue-eyed 43-year-old held maritime ratings and a pilot's license and was also a celebrated aerial navigator living in Los Angeles.

[8] He fell in love with Mary Beatrice Martinelli (née Passadori), herself a divorcee with no children, who ran a beauty salon in Oakland, California.

[9][10] 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 that she had purchased with funds donated by Purdue University.

On March 16, the first attempt was delayed due to weather conditions, and Noonan, having had a chance to assess the plane's navigational equipment, had identified a major deficiency in the flight's preparations.

On April 4, Fred's forty-fourth birthday, as he and his bride drove through Fresno on their way back to Oakland along the Golden State Highway, they hit another car head-on.

In Miami, 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.

[citation needed] When Earhart made the announcement on May 30, she said she had originally "planed to be alone except for a navigator on the Pacific, where objectives were small islands on a vast ocean.

Earhart made jotted comments that spoke rather dismissively of "Freddie," as he looked for a lighthouse and pointed out a partly submerged wreck off shore."

Contrary to belief, 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 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.

There is also some motion picture evidence to suggest that a belly antenna on their Electra might have snapped on takeoff, which could explain Earhart's inability to receive radio transmissions during the flight.

[15][16] One relatively new theory suggests that Noonan may have made a mistake in navigation due to the flight's crossing of the International Date Line.

[17] However, this theory is based entirely on supposition and misunderstanding of astronomy; it does not offer any evidence 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[18] on a TIGHAR forum.

Many later studies came to the same conclusion; navigator and aeronautical engineer Elgen Long, developed the "crash and sink" theory which is the most widely accepted explanation of Earhart's and Noonan's fate.

Betty Klenck heard an apparently injured man acting agitated with a distressed woman claiming to be Earhart, and uttering repeatedly what sounded like, "Marie".

Four years earlier, in a letter to her mother, Earhart had asked that, should anything ever happen to her, the suitcase of private papers stored in her closet in California be destroyed.

In 1940, Gerald Gallagher, a British colonial officer and a licensed pilot, radioed his superiors to tell them that he believed he had found Earhart's skeleton, along with a sextant box, under a tree on the island's southeast corner.

Although Noonan required and used a sextant for celestial navigation, this artifact has been connected to an American naval survey vessel that visited Gardner Island in 1939, a year before it was recovered.

[21] In a 1998 report to the American Anthropological Association, researchers, including a forensic anthropologist and an archaeologist, concluded, "What we can be certain of is that bones were found on the island in 1939–40, associated with what were observed to be women's shoes and a navigator's sextant box, and that the morphology of the recovered bones, insofar as we can tell by applying contemporary forensic methods to measurements taken at the time, appears consistent with a female of Earhart's height and ethnic origin.

Ocean explorer Robert Ballard led a 2019 expedition to locate Earhart's Electra or evidence that it landed on Nikumaroro as supposed by the Gardner/Nikumaroro hypothesis.

After days of searching the deep cliffs supporting the island and the nearby ocean using state of the art equipment and technology, Ballard did not find any evidence of the plane or any associated wreckage of it.

Allison Fundis, Ballard's chief operating officer of the expedition stated, “We felt like if her plane was there, we would have found it pretty early in the expedition.”[26] Although Fred Noonan has left a much smaller mark in popular culture than Amelia Earhart's, his legacy is remembered sporadically.

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.