July 2, 1937

On this Day in History in 1937 Amelia Earhart went missing during her attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world. While history has long remembered Earhart most forget that she was not the only one aboard her small aircraft, the Electra, she also had a navigator aboard, Frederick Noonan, who went missing alongside her.

Amelia Earhart alongside her navigator Fred Noonan

On the morning of July 2 the two left from New Guinea and were supposed to land on Howland Island, an island in the center of the Pacific Ocean. Through this stretch there was more than 2,500 miles of ocean between where they left in New Guinea and the remote island they were scheduled to stop at to refuel. They had already traveled 22,000 miles over the course of 40 days with more than 20 stops prior to leaving their last known location.

After a two week search failed to find any sign of the two they were both declared lost at sea. The U.S. government's stance was that they had run out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. Noonan was officially declared dead on June 20, 1938 while Earhart was officially declared dead six months later on January 5, 1939.

Though Earhart lives among the pages of numerous history books, her disappearance often leading to conspiracy theories around being lost in the Bermuda Triangle, Noonan has much more often been regulated to nothing more than a footnote in the stories of the lost Electra.

Fred Noonan was born in 1893 and was just 44 years old when he disappeared. He had married his second wife only four months before his disappearance. After working as a navigator for Pan Am Noonan joined Earhart for her first attempt to circumnavigate the world. This trip was cut short when Earhart's Electra clipped the ground upon takeoff from Howland Island and its landing gear collapsed. Only one month later they made the attempt for the second time that would result in the Electra disappearing with both people on board.