Fred Noonan Fred Noonan Frederick Joseph "Fred" Noonan (born April 4, 1893; declared missing July 2, 1937 and 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. He was last seen in Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, on the last land stop with famed aviator Amelia Earhart (1897-1937), as her navigator when they disappeared somewhere over the Central Pacific Ocean during one of the last legs of their attempted pioneering round-the-world flight. Fred Noonan was born in Cook County, Illinois (the
New Guinea has failed. See Religion in Papua New Guinea. New Guinea New Guinea (; ; ; , historically, "") is a large island off the continent of Australia. It is the world's second-largest, after Greenland, covering a land area of , and the largest wholly or partly within the Southern Hemisphere and Oceania. The eastern half of the island is the major land mass of the independent state of Papua New Guinea. The western half, referred to as either Western New Guinea or West Papua, has been administered by Indonesia since 1962 and comprises the provinces of Papua and West Papua.