There are a few myths about Fred's departure from Pan American.
Myth 1. He was fired for drinking.
Myth 2. That he has been portayed as being responsible in some way for the Earhart Disappearance.
Myth 1 is true and Myth 2 is not as true as commonly held.
Fred Noonan was 'let go' at the end of 1936 for drinking. He was in the words of a fellow crew member sent to the Cincinnati Division. I am assured by a former PAA navigator that that was the euphemism for 'getting the boot.' What is my evidence for this and how credible it that evidence.?
In the archives of PAA, in Miami, there exists a series of transcribed interviews between John Leslie, a former PAA executive and several crew from the pioneering days of the Clippers. Two of those crew flew with Fred. They are Victor Wright and Harry Canaday. Both, but particularly Wright tell in no uncertain terms what happened. Fred developed a severe drink problem after Acapulco where the Clipper stopped during its transfer across country from Miami to Alameda. He suddenly found fame according to Wright and it went to his head. Before this he had been 'rock steady' with no sign of a 'crackup'. He 'did a beautiful piece of work'. Then in Acapulco everyone was shaking his hand. Overnight he became a celebrity, invited to all the parties where he regaled the company with sea faring tales. He was very much in demand and the partying habit continued in Honolulu, Wake, Guam and Manila. One day he had to be sought out by Wright who had to get into some 'interesting situations' and proceeded to sober him up before his flight This resulted in a fall in the bathtub which knocked out his front teeth.Canaday navigated on the way back. One might say that this was 'normal behaviour' for the aviators of the time. Maybe for some but not for PAA. Andre Priester another executive of the era instantly dismissed anyone under the influence of alcohol. It is a measure of the esteem in which Fred was held that he was tolerated for almost two years. Wright says that the 'Old Man' covered up for Fred. Was that Musick? or Priester? or Trippe? They knew he did a faultless job and he was indispensable for the proving flights. But by the time regular passenger carrying service was set up and other navigators were trained his value waned and he became a liability. The company carried very high class personages from heads of state to movie stars. It simply would not do for them to see the plane's navigator carried aboard comatose. He had to go. But according to Wright, PAA could not lose face by admitting they had employed Fred when he was in this state. They had too much to lose so he simply disappeared from the payroll. That is why there is no official record of him having been dismissed. To date, this transcribed interview is the strongest evidence that he was fired. I believe in the truth of it because (1) It is corroborated by two contemporaries who were close to Fred and by numerous others who followed him in the few years after his departure. (2) It was not refuted by John Leslie who was a very senior and respected PAA executive who was collecting these taped interviews for his History of PAA. This transcription was not just a little chat with an old colleague. (3) At about this time Fred was almost suicidal, according to his friend Marius Lodeesen. There are others who say that 'something had gone wrong in his life'. His marriage was finished and his career effectively ended.
Of course there are those who defended him when asked in later life if it was true that he drank himself out of a job. Harry Canaday and John Leslie in particular. When Horace Brock wrote about his own career with PAA and although he signed on a few years after Fred's departure the stories were still fresh . He sent his manuscript to John Leslie who wrote a very scathing reply in defense of Fred. But who was he protecting? Fred or PAA? Or both? Brock went ahead and published anyway. He also went on to an illustrious career with the Company.
Often I have asked myself why should I bother to post this and who cares? One answer is that I see a tendency now to minimise this issue. Let the dead rest in peace. Sure. But what about the living? I dont like to see people effectively being called liars and gagged or dismissed. I started out like many who felt sympathetic towards Fred. Either way he calls for our sympathy. He had a drink problem and needed help or he was being held responsible for the demise of the Earhart Flight. I started out wanting to vaguely clear his name over the drink issue but have ended up on the other side. And after ten years he is still the 'good guy'. But I also feel that if he had lived he would have been the first to hold up his hand and would have deplored the glossing over and covering up that has gone on over this issue. He would have taken full responsibility for his actions. He would not have stood for being whitewashed. He was most likely, in a way, rather proud of his drinking and his womanizing and his Irish lineage.
If anything ,he mythologised himself.
I shall deal with Myth 2. next.
Fred J Noonan
Pan American Airways
Ye Little Wood, Coconut Grove.
Gail Patrick
10 comments:
Myth 2. That Fred was responsible in some way for the demise of the Earhart Flight.
As I stated in Myth 1, I believe that the Wright Transcript along with the numerous contemporary and near contemporary statements lend strong support to the view that Fred Noonan developed a drinking probem which resulted in his being fired by PAA.
I do not say this to detract from Fred. I hold him in very high regard and I do not think it had a bearing on the result of the Flight.
However I have seen a tendency in the last ten years to minimise the problem out of, I think, a misguided desire to protect his image from those who would wish to portray him as a scapegoat. But I think it is a wrong assumption that there are a majority of people out there who blame him. It does not appear that he has been held responsible in anything like the numbers I first imagined. A trawl through thousands of newspaper citations certainly does not even hint at his being responsible. In fact the first I could find was in the 1980's. Of course he was the navigator and its natural to question what went wrong navigationally. But to ask this question is not the same as labelling him a Scapegoat. On the other hand I am not American and I do not know just how much he has been blamed in the minds of the public. All I can say is that the newspapers since the disappearance do not, by and large, blame him. Quite the opposite. Most devote space to extolling his virtues as a fine navigator. If anything the newspapers were more critical before the flight when he was cited for drunk driving, his divorce and his elopment.
In conclusion then I believe that he developed a drink problem severe enough to be fired for, but that it had no bearing on the outcome of the Flight. I also believe that the modern day tendency to minimise the drink problem is the result of an erroneous perception ie. that the media concensus is that he was somehow to blame for the demise of the Flight.
I would welcome the thoughts from those in America especially, on this. How is he perceived in your country?
Hi Jackie,
We had an interesting conversation on H2G2 a couple of years ago about a fun article I wrote about Noonan and the possible effect of omitting a parallax correction.
I was looking to see if you had written that book yet and found your blog.
Looking forward to future installments. Hard to see how the problem was not Fred's fault in some way (without allowing for faulty maps, fouled up communication procedures, equipment failure so on).
P.S.
In navigator school in the 1960s, the common belief that Fred was a drunk and fouled up his final flight.
Whenever I worried about messing up my navigation and missing an island, Fred always came to mind.
Your research does tend to bear out that view...that said, excessive drinking back in those days and even into the 50s and 60s was more tolerated as normal behavior.
Hi Bob,
yes I remember your article and our discussions. Good to hear from you again. Thanks for the post. As you can see I havent had many! It is good to hear from people who have actually practised aerial navigation and your comments are very welcome. If I recall the parallax correction was a lunar one? I think I may have replied that I thought he would have had a proforma and so it would have been difficult for him to make that error but who knows? It is known that he regularly used the moon so maybe he relied on his memory and being fatigued, forgot to make the correction. It certainly seems a puzzle, since the moon was available that morning. It would be interesting to assume that he did forget the parallax and then work out where that would have put them when he crossed the resulting lop with the sun's lop.
I'm plodding on slowly with the book, time being the chief restraint. I've done as much research as I can do just now so I may as well get down what I have either in book form or here. So watch this space!
Jackie.
Jackie,
I made a link to your blog over on mine.
http://thefirecloudreport.blogspot.com/
Also, I am now a "follower" so google lets me know when you publish.
So get to work. I read about you finding the Norwich birth certificate.
I want to read about your research in your book or blog.
On that parallax issue...maybe things were different in 1937 than they were in 1967...
When we flew from Wake Island to Guam with a broken Loran C, I had to rely on only the sun, the moon, and a driftmeter.
I forgot the parallax correction on the moon and my first fix put me 75 miles of my dead reckoning track.
I was puzzled and somewhat panicked. The whiskey compass and gyro compass were in agreement and the driftmeter view did not show stong whitecaps so I had to believe that there was a major error in my celestial positions, which kept showing me way to the left of track.
I decided to rely on dead reckoning and was greatly relieved to see Guam dead ahead, hours later.
I thought of Fred often during those hours.
oops...LORAN A, not C, this used an APN-9, which first introduced in B-29s in 1945...
Thats a very interesting post Bob. I had assumed a proforma would always be used and so it would be virtually impossible to forget the parallax.If Fred didnt have one had forgotten to correct,then he could also have been in the order of 75 miles out which would have been a realistic figure in that it would have been near enough to still give a strong signal but far enough not to see Howland?
Hi Bob,
Ha! The Norwich Birth Certificate.Alas, that was a red herring.It seemed probable for a while because of the English connection through his mother. No birth cert has ever been found most likely because it was not mandatory in Illinois to register a birth until 1916. But we do know now that his date of birth was april 4 1893 from his baptism and other records. The Norwich one apart, two other Fred J Noonans have emerged from that era. One also in Chicago who coincidentally even sailed on the same ship as Fred, and one who also coincidentally married a Josie, a fact which has given rise to much confusion because both Fred's are in the same family. More curiously the English one's family mostly end up in Illinois too and another English one spends his life in the Merchant navy, as did Fred for 22 years.
In the mid-196os, The United States Air Force taught us to do a “precomp” for celestial navigation. The method taught required one final math adjustment, called the parallax correction, for the Moon, because of its proximity to the earth.
The correction, as you know, is greatest when the moon is on the observers horizon and approaches zero when it is directly overhead.
I don’t know if this correction was or was not “built-in” to the proforma methods that Fred used. in 1937. In 1965, as taught by the U. S. Air Force, it was not built in.
Usually, one had a reliable Line of Position, when near an island, from Loran A. This was good for 150-200 nautical miles out. On this one occasion, I had about the same aids as Fred due to a Loran malfunction. I blew it, well-rested with no hangover.
One wonders if Fred had the opportunity to use the stars during the long overnight flight or if it was partially or totally overcast during all or part of the flight. If not, he would have had no reason to doubt a very bad sun/moon position fix
I remember you spoke of the “aim-off” method of locating a destination. That is where you aim to be off to one side of the destination and then fly in on a sunline or other some recent LOP. That seems to be exactly what Amelia and Fred were attempting according to one of the radio transmissions that Amelia made that morning. Was Fred on the wrong side of the island when he turned on the sun line and flew away?
Usually, with clear skies at 8,000 feet you can see an island like the Wake atoll about 25 miles away. The skies around Howland were evidently not totally clear and they reported flying at a much lower altitude, apparently to get under the low clouds and spot Howland..
Whether it was due to a basic navigational error or not, I’ve always imagined how Fred must have felt during his last hours of flight. He let her down, that much is clear.
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