This guy must certainly skew the life expectancy stats for his profession...
Posted on 09/29/2006 2:20:20 PM PDT by Borges
SEATTLE - Clayton Scott, who served as Bill Boeing's personal pilot and later become a top Boeing Co. test pilot, has died at age 101.
Scott's death was confirmed by Eden Hopkins, a spokeswoman for The Museum of Flight, which is hosting a memorial service for him Oct. 6. The service will be open to the public.
He apparently died of a heart attack at his apartment in Mercer Island, east of Seattle, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported for Friday editions.
Scott was born July 15, 1905, in Coudersport, Pa., and later moved to the Pacific Northwest. An early aviation buff, Scott owned his own airplane by 1928.
He is on the record books for making the first landing and takeoff at Boeing Field, after an emergency forced him to touch down on the then-uncompleted airfield.
In the 1930s, Scott had a chance encounter with Bill Boeing, founder of Boeing Co., when Scott was refueling his airplane at a marina in Alert Bay, British Columbia, where Boeing was refueling his yacht.
Boeing hired Scott to be his personal pilot. Scott also served as chief production test pilot for Boeing's company from 1940 to 1966, flying both military and commercial planes. Boeing is now based in Chicago.
The municipal airfield in Renton, south of Seattle, was renamed Clayton Scott Field last year, to celebrate Scott's 100th birthday.
Scott's wife, Myrtle, died in October 1998.
God Bless him and the men like him!
Thank you for "shaking down" all those magnificent warbirds.
Born 2 years after the first Wright Brother's flight and 5 years after the turn of the century. He lived through WWI, WWII, Radio Age, vaccum tubes, transistors, silicon chips, bi-planes, mono-planes, the Jet Age and the Space Age.
What a life.
Attention, aviators...
This guy must certainly skew the life expectancy stats for his profession... LOL, that is exactly what I was thinking as I read the article. |
We lost another old Boeing test pilot earlier this year; James R. Gannett. Gannett was Alvin M. "Tex" Johnston's co-pilot when Tex took the 707 prototype (367-80) out on August 7, 1955 and barrel-rolled the big airliner 400 feet above the water at the Seafair Gold Cup hydroplane race on Lake Washington - in front of thousands of people, including the president and most of the executives of Boeing as well as many potential customers.
Once Tex completed the roll, he did it again. And the jet age was launched.
If you want on or off my aerospace ping list, please contact me by Freep mail.
heres a video of the 707 dash 80 video roll.http://www.aviationexplorer.com/707_roll_video.htm
I don't think it can be said any better, so I will simply respond...Ditto.
Is that the pic from the first Dash 80 flight?
When he was born the way to listen to music at home was on either wax cylinders or gramophone discs that only held about 4 minutes of music at most with machines that took up the space of a small table. Today on the date of Mr. Scott's passing, you have iPods that store thousands of hours of music on a little box thinner than a normal pack of cigarettes! The 20th Century has sure been an age of enormous change.
Try this link.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rILk6-4SMJQ
Amazing! Thanks for sharing that insight.
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