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
Amelia Earhart of the National Woman's Party and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. During an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937 in a Purdue-funded Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island. Fascination with her life, career, and disappearance continues to this day. Earhart was the daughter of Samuel "Edwin" Stanton Earhart (1867–1930) and Amelia "Amy" (; 1869–1962). She was born in Atchison, Kansas, in the home of her maternal grandfather, Alfred Gideon Otis (1827–1912), who was a former federal judge, the president of