Fred Nonan has been given a lot of flack over he years and has always stood in Eahart's shadow. Fred was born in Cook County Illinois not far from me so I've always felt that he had gotten the short-end of the stick. A bit about Fred:
At the age of 17, Noonan shipped out of Seattle as an ordinary seaman on a British sailing ship. During his career he sailed around Cape Horn seven times, with three of those times being under sail. Rising steadily through the rating system by receiving excellent performance reviews, he reached officer status. As an officer on ammunition ships during WWI, he served on three ships that were sunk from under him by U-boats. After the war, Noonan continued in the Merchant Marine serving a total of 22 years.
In the late 1920s he learned to fly and by 1930 he had received a "limited commercial pilot's license" In following year as a Merchant Mariner, he was awarded his Master rating, any ocean," Qualifying him to return to sea as a ship's Captain. However he remained with aviation and by the early 1930s, had accepted a position with Pan American World Airways as a navigation instructor in Miami and an airport manager in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Once again, rising through the ranks he eventually became the inspector for all of the company's airports.
In March 1935, Noonan was the navigator on the first Pan Am Sikorsky S-42 clipper at San Francisco Bay. In April he navigated the historic round-trip China Clipper flight between San Francisco and Honolulu Noonan was also responsible for mapping all Pan Am's clipper routes across the Pacific Ocean. In 1937 he felt he had risen through the ranks as far as he could as a navigator, and decided to starting a navigation school.
Enter Earhart and her proposed flight. The world was already crisscrossed by commercial airline routes (many of which Noonan himself had first navigated and mapped), so nothing new or important was expected from this flight. In fact it was mostly an adventurous publicity stunt for Earhart to gather public attention for her next book. Noonan was also attracted to this project because Earhart's mass market fame would almost certainly generate considerable publicity, which in turn might reasonably be expected to attract attention to him and the navigation school that he hoped to establish when they returned.