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
Michael Noonan (filmmaker) of the ARC Centre for Excellence in Creative Industries, wrote a piece in defense of QUT and Noonan in "The Courier-Mail" called 'Taking Arts into the Digital Era'. Michael Noonan posted an extended response in "The Australian" on 5 September 2007, entitled 'I am the one who has been humiliated'. The article countered many of the claims made by Hookham and Maclennan. Noonan wrote: "Hookham and MacLennan have claimed that their concerns about my work were ignored by me and the internal channels within the university. This is untrue. Their outburst at my confirmation was unsettling and abusive, but I