Gone West

The Wall Street Journal
September 30, 2006
REMEMBRANCES

Mr. Boeing's Personal Pilot Blazed Trails in the Sky
He Performed Tests In Aviation's Risky Early Years;
Flying at the Age of 100
By J. LYNN LUNSFORD

September 30, 2006;*Page*A6
CLAYTON "SCOTTY" SCOTT (1905-2006), Aviator
Clayton L. "Scotty" Scott had a cockpit view of 20th-century aviation
history.
In the late 1920s, he was the first to fly paying passengers across the
Gulf of Alaska -- a passage so risky that the airline offered a new car
to the first pilot to fly 1,000 people on the route without killing
anyone. Later he was the Boeing Co. founder's personal pilot and
test-piloted thousands of the company's planes, ranging from B-17
bombers to 727 jetliners. He didn't stop flying until a year ago, after
a flight to his 100th-birthday celebration.

Clayton Scott with an early amphibious plane in 1929, and after flying
to his 100th birthday party.
"Scotty was one of the last of aviation's true pioneers," says Doug
Murphy, the Federal Aviation Administration's top official in the
Pacific Northwest. Mr. Scott, who died Sept. 28 at age 101, was listed
as the oldest active pilot in the U.S. at the time of his last flight,
according to Mr. Murphy.
Flying wasn't for the faint of heart when Mr. Scott, who first soloed in
1927, started his nearly 80 years in the air. Fabric-covered airplanes
had engines that could conk out without warning; in remote Alaska,
routine mechanical problems could strand passengers for days, often
without shelter. Longtime friend Richard Taylor, a former Boeing test
pilot and executive, described Mr. Scott as "a risk taker, but at the
same time, he had good judgment. When you put those things together, it
explains the things he did."
Or as Mr. Scott put it in an interview last year: "A pilot back then had
to be part aviator, part bushman, part mechanic and part crazy."
After starting in the late 1920s as a pilot for Pacific Air Transport --
one of the carriers that later merged to become United Airlines -- Mr.
Scott was taking off from the water near Valdez, Alaska, when a rock
ripped a gaping hole in the bottom of his plane's mahogany fuselage. "By
the time we got to shore, the passengers were sitting up to their chests
in water," Mr. Scott recalled in the interview.
As part of efforts to improve flying's image about the same time,
Pacific Air Transport founder Vern Gorst made the challenge to the
airline's pilots to fly 1,000 passengers between Seattle and Alaska
without any fatalities. Mr. Scott won the prize -- a LaSalle, one of
General Motor Corp.'s early luxury cars.
In the most serious of his four crashes over the years, Mr. Scott was
feared dead in 1965 when he rammed into the Cascade Mountains near
Seattle after an engine failure. "We were all heading up to look for the
wreckage, but he walked out before we got there," recalls Boeing
Commercial Airplanes Chief Executive Scott Carson. The crash had knocked
out Mr. Scott, but he freed himself after waking up with fuel dripping
on the back of his neck and his leg pinned beneath the instrument panel.
Mr. Scott met Boeing founder William Boeing on Sept. 17, 1931, at a gas
pump in Carter Bay, British Columbia, while Mr. Scott was fueling his
airplane and Mr. Boeing was fueling his yacht. He became Mr. Boeing's
personal pilot in 1934, flying Mr. Boeing and his guests in a seaplane
to wherever the yacht was moored. Unhappy with the performance of Mr.
Boeing's Boeing-built flying boat, Mr. Scott persuaded his boss to buy a
more powerful one built by rival Douglas Aircraft Co. "I wasn't sure how
Bill was going to react when I made that suggestion, but he said he
trusted my judgment," Mr. Scott said.
When World War II broke out, Mr. Scott became a production test pilot
for Boeing, serving as chief production test pilot from 1947 until his
retirement in 1966. He then spent almost 40 years building, restoring
and attaching pontoons or floats to planes at the Renton, Wash.,
airport. Among his prized possessions: a photo of himself flying beneath
the Brooklyn Bridge during a 1969 nationwide publicity tour, in a
replica of the original B&W float plane that launched Boeing Co.
He continued to fly alone until he was 90, when he adopted a policy of
never flying without another licensed pilot in the plane. Nevertheless,
friends say, Mr. Scott regularly flew his Cessna 195 float plane from
150 to 200 hours a year until his late 90s. After his 100th-birthday
celebration last year at Seattle's Museum of Flight, the city of Renton
renamed its airport after Mr. Scott. A new statue there depicts him in
his 1920s flying garb.