The last paragraph really says it all. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/us/10myers.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin John W. Myers, a leading civilian test pilot in World War II, who helped develop the first American fighter plane designed specifically for night combat, died on Jan. 31 at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 96. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Eric Long/Smithsonian Institution John W. Myers at the Smithsonian in 2006 with a P-61 Black Widow fighter and a figure of himself as a younger man. His death was announced by his personal assistant, Janice Merriweather. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1936, Mr. Myers, a native of Los Angeles, practiced entertainment law there, and he was later assistant general counsel of Lockheed. But he had been enthralled with aviation since learning to fly while at Stanford, where he majored in political science. He ferried planes for Lockheed in addition to his legal work, then pursued the death-defying exploits of a test pilot. Mr. Myers joined Northrop Aircraft as its chief engineering test pilot in 1941 and was best known for testing its P-61 Black Widow fighter over Southern California, then teaching military pilots to fly it. His skills brought him the nickname Maestro. The radar-equipped twin-engine Black Widow was nearly as large as some bombers, painted black, and bristling with machine guns and cannons. Flown by a three-member crew, it began combat operations in mid-1944, the first United States craft envisioned to find enemy planes at night and in bad weather. About 700 Black Widows were built for the Army Air Forces during the war. Their crew members, flying in all the major war theaters, destroyed 127 enemy aircraft and downed 18 robot V-1 buzz bombs launched by the Germans, according to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Flying those large planes was no easy feat. Robert Thum, an Army Air Forces pilot, recalled how his unit had found the Black Widow “slow and cumbersome, and certainly not the hotshot black bullet that we had dreamed of” while training in California. But, as Mr. Thum told it in “P-61: Black Widow Units of World War 2,” by Warren Thompson (Osprey, 1998), everything changed when Mr. Myers arrived. “We were very wary of anyone flying a military aircraft in civilian clothes,” Mr. Thum remembered, but “the first flight demo we witnessed proved that Myers was no ordinary pilot.” Mr. Myers, he said, “had the airplane off the ground in an incredibly short roll,” then made “a steep approach” and finally “landed in about 500 feet, rolled up to our astounded group and let off an ashen-faced flight commander.” In June 1944, while in New Guinea teaching pilots to fly the Black Widow, Mr. Myers gave a sightseeing ride to Charles Lindbergh, who was coaching military pilots in the Pacific. Lindbergh had made his epic solo flight to France unscathed almost two decades earlier, but if not for Mr. Myers’s skills, he might have lost his life on a New Guinea airstrip. As Lindbergh, the navigator for Mr. Myers on that New Guinea flight, recalled it in “The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh” (Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1970), a Black Widow that had accompanied his flight with Mr. Myers landed right behind them at excessive speed before they cleared the runway and was bearing down on their plane. “Except for Myers’s quick thinking, a serious accident would undoubtedly have taken place,” Lindbergh wrote. “Myers kept our plane rolling rapidly along the strip until he had a chance to swing off to the side.” Mr. Myers became a vice president of Northrop in 1946 and later pursued various business ventures in private aviation. He also contributed to educational, environmental and conservation causes. He flew a jet helicopter until he was 93. John Wescott Myers is survived by a daughter, Lucia Myers Wolff, of Shell Beach, Calif., and three grandsons. His wife, Lucia, died in 1999. Recalling his Black Widow days, Mr. Myers told The Los Angeles Daily News in 2001 how he kept the fate of the pilots in mind. As he put it: “My objective was to make this lethal weapon the easiest to fly, most forgiving airplane in history so that those kids who were going to fly it on a black night would have every comfort, every aid, we could give them.”
Test pilots are one of the unsung heroes of the war. Risking their lives, some as civilians, in often untried and very experimental aircraft without the glamour of the front-line pilots. RIP
