John Myers, 96; called legendary World War II test pilot

LOS ANGELES - John W. Myers, a business executive and renowned test pilot during World War II whose extraordinary flying skills earned him the nickname "Maestro," has died. He was 96.

Mr. Myers died in his sleep Jan. 31 at his home in Beverly Hills, said Janice Merriweather, his longtime assistant.

"For us, he was a legend of legends," Barron Hilton, hotel magnate and aviation enthusiast, said in a statement. "He was truly a pioneer and inspired many test pilots."

General Chuck Yeager, the legendary test pilot who met Mr. Myers in 1945 as a young test pilot, agreed.

"He was about 10 years older and a role model for all of us pilots," Yeager said in a statement. "We always looked up to him."

As chief engineering test pilot for Northrop Corp. during the war, Mr. Myers most notably performed experimental test flights on the P-61 Black Widow, America's first successful night fighter, and on the first flying wing.

"John Myers was a true pioneer and legend of aviation who throughout his entire career demonstrated his exceptional flying abilities in all types of aircraft," General Jack Dailey, director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, told the Los Angeles Times.

During the war, Mr. Myers nearly died test-flying one prototype aircraft that never made it to production because of its performance. "In fact," Dailey said, "he told Jack Northrop it wouldn't fly." But as chief test pilot, "he said, `If anybody's going to fly it, it's going to be me.' He did it, and he was lucky to survive the crash."

Back then, Dailey said, "They didn't really know if those airplanes would fly or not. They didn't have the computer simulations and sophisticated wind-tunnel data we have today."

Dailey said Mr. Myers' philosophy "was that you have to go for it, and you always have to have your head a little bit out the window, meaning you're hanging it out there a bit."

Mr. Myers's exceptional skills as a pilot were evident after going to the South Pacific in 1944 to demonstrate the P-61 Black Widow to fighter pilots.

While there, he invited Charles Lindbergh to fly in his P-61 to an airstrip in New Guinea.

They had no trouble landing on the sod strip, but the P-61 that accompanied them came in so fast behind them that it nearly overshot the field, Lindbergh wrote in "The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh."

The other plane landed before he and Myers were clear of the runway, Lindbergh wrote, and it was moving "so fast and so badly that except for Myers' quick thinking, a serious accident would undoubtedly have taken place."

"Myers kept our plane rolling rapidly along the strip until he had a chance to swing off to the side. . . . He kept our plane rolling until the Army crew passed by."

Long after retiring from the business world, Mr. Myers continued to fly. He was 90 when he gave up flying his Cessna Citation II SP jet.