Presentation Date: January 23, 2003
CAPT Ken Beer USAAF Pilot
Wrote first book on Instrument Flying, now in Smithsonian, Washington, DC. Barnstormer & US Mail Pilot. Over 70,000 flight hours logged!
- Earned USAAF Wings @ Kelly Field, TX
- Flight Instructor was then-LT Claire Chennault !
- Barnstormer & US Mail Pilot
- Earned Mexican Pilot License #4
- Wrote first book on Instrument Flying, now in Smithsonian, Washington, DC
- Chief Pilot for PAN AM for 30 years (Martin, Sikorsky, Boeing flying boats, ...)
- Over 70,000 (!) flight hours logged!
Still plays singles tennis at 99 (and holds 72 National Championships)!
From Curtis JN-4 "Jennys" to BOEING 707s, Ken Beer offers a truly fascinating life-adventure.
A Century of Aviation - - and Laughter
"A lot of my friends think I'm still too young, especially those with whom I play tennis."
Ken Beer has lived an extraordinary life, one that even today is marked by routine activity. Daily Ken wakes early, and volleys a tennis ball 500 times consecutively off a plywood target outside his Peninsula home - - before he goes back indoors for breakfast. Not bad for a man who is 100 years old.
And though Ken may be challenged trying to remember the specific dates, he lights up with passion when asked about the overabundant highlights of his life, highlights which allow Ken to display his great sense of humor.
"When I was graduated from college I wondered what I was going to do. Someone suggested I join the Air Force and see if I can make a contribution there. So that's what I did.
That meant starting from the bottom, going to the Air Force school, at Kelly Field."
Ken left Stanford University in 1924 with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics, and headed for Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas. Beer's primary instructor at the flight school was a then-Lieutenant Claire Chennault, who would later achieve fame as commander of the AVG (the original Flying Tigers) in China.
"He was a grand fellow. He was almost famous at the time that I was learning to fly... We had six students and one instructor, and the instructor tried to keep the students through the whole pattern of training. naturally there were students who didn't pass, so even though he started out maybe with six students he ended up with one or two." One of the humorous incidents in Beer's training under Chennault came when Ken first flew solo, in 1928. It was a custom of Chennault's to pull the pin on the control stick in the back seat, tap the student on the head with the stick to get his attention, then throw that stick overboard to dramatically show the student was ready for solo flying.
Aware of the custom, Beer tucked a spare stick inside his flight suit. Beer says that when Chennault tapped him with the rear stick and threw it overboard, Ken likewise threw the spare stick overboard. That drew an immediate startled response from the instructor.
Also while at Kelly Field, Beer was required to take a nighttime cross-country flight. While Ken was preparing for a leg of that flight, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times pressed Ken for a ride to L.A.
"It was in Utah... He said, 'I've got to get the story.' And I said I've got to go to Las Vegas... so I said, well okay, all right, come with me. I'll take the mail sacks out of the front seat and you can sit on what's left and I'll take you to Las Vegas."
"We took from Salt Lake City. It was dark, and we flew to Las Vegas. If you've never made that trip, it's over the mountains of southern Utah and of course over a long period of desert of Nevada."
Ken says, "We finally got to Las Vegas, and he got out with a little sort of shake and chagrin and he said, 'Geez, that's the first time I've ever flown at night.'
"And I said, 'You've got nothing on me. That's my first time, too.'
The U.S. Mail
Ken flew mailplanes for the U.S. Postal Service for awhile in 1928 and 1929. During that time he also delivered the last Ford Tri-motor built. Beer took off in Dearborn, Michigan and flew to St. Louis, Missouri and then to Brownsville, Texas to hand off the passenger plane to Pan Am. Though he took off in light haze on the first leg of the trip, Beer encountered heavy overcast with 600 feet visibility, but made it to Brownsville without incident.
In the 1930s, as a Captain for Pan American, Beer flew President Franklin D. Roosevelt's son up and down the west coast. "I got to know him pretty well. I couldn't say it was a great honor, really. But I'm saying that with my lips pretty well closed, because he didn't have much chance to show anything. He wasn't up to his father's abilities, he wasn't up to his family's reputation... I hadn't heard form him after he left. So I guess I didn't make much of an impression either."
Pan Am
Ken says he 'started from the bottom' when he began his commercial airline career. He was one of the first 10-15 employees of Pan American, and in 1928 became one of the youngest captains of Juan Tripp's airline. Pan Am Capt. Edwin Musik checked out Beer in a (twin-engine) Sikorsky S-38 single-float plane. Ken says he knew Musik well, calling him "very much of a gentleman. You would hardly know that he had anything to do with flying."
Back in the 1930s, Pan American was an airline built on the hulls of flying boats, the classic Sikorsky and Boeing Clippers, which hauled passengers and cargo from stateside harbors to exotic ports of call in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Beer says seaplanes, of which he flew the S-42, the Martin 130 and the Boeing 314, each had special idiosyncrasies.
"If you're flying a seaplane and land on the water and have a long ways to go, the logical thing is to keep it on the step and fly at a pretty high speed, maybe 50 to 60 miles an hour. If you've got 15 miles of bay to transit, that's the easiest way of doing it. But you've got be careful when you're taxiing on the step, because you have a following wave. If you stop your airplane too quick, that following wave will climb right up on your tail surfaces and damage them. The thing to do is go off the step slowly and then keep going so the wave behind you has time to subside."
Piloting any multi-engine airplane in those days was a challenge. Beer recalls flying a Sikorsky tri-motor in South America... essentially performing as a test pilot for the craft.
He also clearly remembers piloting a Boeing 314 from the San Francisco Bay Area to Hawaii.
"I was sitting on the left side of the cockpit... when the number two engine - - I was looking at it - - just disposed of two cylinders. They went pulp, pulp and dropped off, just like that."
Beer radioed San Francisco tower that he was cutting his number two engine, because he saw the number seven and nine cylinders fall off into the ocean.
"Now, that's a little more specific than you ordinarily send in a message like that. You just say 'I lost two cylinders'. But you don't often see them fall off, yourself.
"The reply came back just as I expected - - how do you know that the number seven and nine cylinders went off?' And I simply said,' because I saw them go off. ' They opened the gate and I had to fill it."
Beer says that though he recalls having to make forced landings on the ground, he never made an emergency landing at sea. Yet he assisted a mechanic in an in-flight engine repair on a Boeing 314. The Clippers had catwalks in the wings through which a person could crawl to the engine nacelles.
"We had some trouble with the number three engine, the first one on the right. I was curious and wanted to be involved in all the things that were going on. So the engineer and I went out to that number three engine. We took the big cowling off, took the parts of the engine off - - the engine was stopped by the way - - and it was a carburetor problem. We took the carburetor off and it was a problem we could fix with tape and gasoline-proof paste." Ken also recalls the time he ticked off a Pan Am maintenance crew, when they discovered they had to completely purge a seaplane's hydraulic system. While Beer was en-route, the hydraulic reservoir was found to be nearly dry. Ken had a mechanic use orange juice and milk to keep up the fluid pressure.
"We did have water, and I don't know why we wouldn't use that. But, that's the story and I'm stuck with it."
Flying for Pan Am before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Ken says he saw Japanese warships as he came in to land in Hong Kong harbor. Although Japan had already begun its conquest of Southeast Asia and the islands of the Southwest Pacific, the United States had yet to enter the war, and the Clipper was not a target for the Japanese Imperial Navy.
On one of Beer's flights, though, a Honolulu to San Francisco circuit, he believes he got a unique peek into secret preparations for the United States entering the World War.
Aboard the Boeing 314 Beer was piloting was a VIP passenger, a US Navy Admiral,who preceded Husband Kimmel as commanding officer of Pearl Harbor.
"We were able to set up a table with six chairs. With six people at a table you could converse with any one of the other five. So that made for a very comfortable flight with the Admiral."
The officer was on the ship under an alias. Beer, being pilot-in-command, knew who everybody was on the flying boat, and given the flying boat's accommodations, had to be careful not to blow the Admiral's cover.
"I'm sitting at the table, talking to a man who I know - - I know his name, know his rank and his position - - but I'm not supposed to reveal it. That's a touchy position to be in. But I guess I got by with it because he didn't complain." "He was going back to Washington to say he would not be responsible for the Navy being in Pearl Harbor on Sunday. I think the Washington... politicians wanted to make Pearl Harbor a target to invite a challenge... so it would give them something to be in the war. Roosevelt wanted to get into the war and so he used Pearl Harbor for a target. Now, I've been pretty blunt about saying that and maybe I'm too strong about saying it, but that's my impression."
Beer says he believes the Admiral knew Pearl Harbor was vulnerable, poorly defended and went back to Washington to tell the War Department he would not be responsible for it. "And he told them that way in Washington. Well, Washington just replaced him and put Kimmel in his place."
Pan Am's role during World War II was simple, according to Beer. "The military took over Pan American as a unit. And they said, we'll supply the cargo and tell you where to take it, but you're on your own. Stay as a unit, operate as a unit, under the same organization as you have during peace days."
For Beer, that meant flights mostly to islands in the Southwest Pacific. "We couldn't fly in the North Pacific because the Japanese would be annoyed and we didn't want to annoy them." Along the way, Beer flew a US Navy PBY Catalina, which Ken praised for its hull design and construction. "I never flew a plane with a better bottom than that plane had. You could land it anyway you wanted to on a reasonable sea and it would put up with it. It was a marvelous hull."
When asked how the Catalina was able to sustain flight for as many as 30 hours, Beer replied, without hesitation, "It didn't go anywhere." Ken also recalls that on one of his trans-pacific flights he had an opportunity to spend many hours with famous aviator Charles Lindbergh
"I guess I was supposed to fly him somewhere. He arrived in the San Francisco area... and we got together and I think we had some plane problems, which meant that we had to stay in San Francisco an extra day or so... He and I were associated pretty closely for ten or twelve hours in a day. Then we went to Honolulu and the same thing happened there. We were there for two or three days, together. I got a wonderful opportunity to know him and chat with him. He was a grand fellow. I don't know of anybody I liked to be with more than he was... just a grand person."
By the way, Beer still pays tennis regularly. That practice, combined with his morning routine pay off. Ken Beer has won 72 seniors tennis championships since he turned 60.