Famed Aviatrix Dies At Age 85

Claire L. Walters, a flight instructor, co-founder of the Palms to Pines air race and owner of a popular flight school in Santa Monica that graduated thousands of pilots, has died at age 85.

She died Jan. 1 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of coronary failure following surgery, said her daughter, Susie Brittingham.

A frequent competitor in woman-only air races, she was a key fundraiser for the 99s Museum of Women Pilots. Walters, along with her twin sister, Betty, was enthralled with aviation from an early age.

By 1941, at age 17, she had flown solo and was on her way to fulfilling a goal first declared in grade school - to become a pilot and teach others how to fly.

"At a time when women were in the kitchen, and they were not in airplanes, Claire was one of 100 female flight instructors in the 1940s," C.J. Strawn, a pilot and fellow member of the Ninety-Nines, told the Los Angeles Times. "She was a dynamo and had such a passion for aviation and women fliers."

In 1951, Walters won the Powder Puff Derby she helped re-establish in the late 1940s . On the way home married one of her students, a future commercial pilot.

She founded the Claire Walters Flight Academy in 1960 and since 1987, had mainly flown as a pilot examiner for the FAA. When a former student asked her to establish an air race from Santa Monica to Independence, Ore., she helped start the Palms-to-Pines competition in 1970.

The race, which now ends in Bend, Ore., is the longest-running all-female air race, Strawn said. Walters, who logged 40,000 miles in the cockpit, guided her final flight several years ago, as a co-pilot in the Palms-to-Pines contest, the times noted.

In 1999 she wrote a memoir with her twin sister, a sailplane champion, called "This Flying Life," In it she explained that the twins were obsessed with aviation, from an early age.

After graduating from high school in 1941, Walters worked at a cannery near Fullerton Airport to pay for flying lessons, the Times noted.

"You want to know how badly I wanted to learn (to fly)?" she asked in the 1992 article. "I was making 35 cents an hour at my job, and it cost $7.50 an hour to learn how to fly."

When private aviation within 100 miles of the West Coast was halted after Pearl Harbor, Walters moved to Quartzsite, Ariz. to finish her pilot training, earned her private license in 1943 and her commercial rating a year later.

During World War II, she flew as a ferry pilot, delivering military aircraft throughout the U.S., the Times noted.

A veteran of 10 Powder Puff Derbies, Walters co-piloted with her sister in 1948. The year she won, she shared the cockpit with Fran Bera, who would win the race several more times.

"Since 1944, Walters had been an active member of the Ninety-Nines and founded the local Palms chapter, partly to oversee the Palms-to-Pines race," the Times reported. "In the late 1990s, she also was a driving force, as a fundraiser, behind the establishment of the 99s Museum of Women Pilots in Oklahoma City."