Pretty much anyone flying the pacific then badly needed a navigator. It was basically still a stunt to fly out there then.
Noonan was one of the few people on planet earth who understood navigating trans-pacific by air. He pioneered it.
As to the other glittering jewel of ignorance you gave us to minimize this flight, consider something else. No solo flight crossed the Pacific until after WWII. In 46 some guys did it in a couple of planes across the Aleutians. In 51 a guy did the Japan to Wake to Hawaii route. And the basic route Amelia was on wasn’t done solo until 59.
The Pacific is not the Atlantic. Lindberg could not have done Amelias flight solo. The Pacific is very big.
Interesting. Thanks.
Problem was, Noonan was good, but not particularly great navigator (Amelia was a terrible!) and had drinking problems at the time.
That left the two as a solo pilot and a solo navigator. Either make a mistake, and the other could not correct it, and may not even be able to recognize that an error had been made!
First woman to fly solo around the world:
Jerrie Mock 1964
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrie_Mock
I know her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter.
Mock’s Cessna 180 which she flew around the world, “The Spirit of Columbus,” hangs in the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum in Virginia.
In 1931 Pangborn and Herndon flew from Japan to Wenatchee, WA. nonstop. They were on a round the world record attempt but were arrested for spying when they arrived in Tokyo for taking movies of the area before the landing. They were held for a month before the embassy got them released. They decided to do the Pacific non-stop as a Jap newspaper was offering $ 25,000 to the first ones to do it. The Japanese told them they would be shot down if they came back to Japan. Pangborn modified the Belanca to drop the landing gear after take-off to cut wind resistance. Took 41 hours and they landed at Wenatchee because Seattle was fogged in. He bellied the plane in on a grassy field and the bent prop is in a museum in Wenatchee. The Belanca was sold to a guy who tried to fly from New York to Rome with a woman dressed as a nurse to honor the nurses of The Great War. She supposed to parachute into Rome but the plane crashed somewhere off of Spain.