Fred Noonan an interest in starting a navigation school. In March, he divorced his wife, Josie, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Two weeks later, he married Mary Beatrice Martinelli (born Passadori) of Oakland, California. Noonan was rumored to be a heavy drinker. That was fairly common during this era and there is no contemporary evidence Noonan was an alcoholic, although decades later, a few writers and others made some hearsay claims that he was. 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
Coffee production in Papua New Guinea the 1980s profoundly affected many coffee plantation owners who incurred debts they could not pay off, with the result that many were made redundant. From 1986, a number of cases of coffee rust, caused by "Hemileia vastatrix", also affected some parts of Papua New Guinea which had previously been free of the disease. The coffee industry in Papua New Guinea reached a peak in 1998 when it accounted for about 38% of the country's non-mineral exports and 13% of total exports. Between 1995 and 1998, coffee production contributed to 42% of the revenue of country's total agricultural exports. Since then