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
Fred Noonan Howland-to-Gardner flight (409 statute miles) would have taken 2 hours 55 minutes (at 140 mph). As a result, the aircraft, when having followed the LOP by astronavigation, would have passed far northward of Gardner when reaching its meridian. The "Gardner" hypothesis originates from a 1980s book where navigator Paul Rafford, Jr. "fell off his chair when seeing that the position line points in the direction of Gardner Island". Apart from such supposition, it was with the available fuel reserves (45 gallons) impossible to reach Gardner from the Howland region: the route would have taken 120 U.S. gallons at least. The