Presentation Date: October 26, 2000
Wally Dean
Flew the Pan Am flying boats, He went from Bow boy to Clipper Pilot Flew the Pan Am flying boats, He went from Bow boy to Clipper Pilot
"Flying Boats in the Pacific"
The year 1939 brought Wally Dean the inspiration to pilot flying boats. As a member of his high school marching band, he visited the Pan Am terminal on Treasure Island and was thrilled to see the big aircraft maneuvering in and out of the lagoon.
Four years later, Wally was behind the wheel, piloting flying boats across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii and beyond.
Dean's talk at the October meeting of the Golden Gate Wing was an encore visit from three years ago. Just before he spoke this time, he won one of the Wing's lottery prizes - - a sheet of stamps featuring aircraft of Aviation's Golden Age (1930s). As Dean ran his finger around the page of stamps, he spoke of his having flown the planes, or at least having known one of the fliers of that time who had.
Wally Dean grew up in Los Angeles, where his father worked for aviation parts company Pacific Airmotive. That gave young Wally opportunities to meet such flying pioneers as Roscoe Turner, Wiley Post and Harold Gatty, Amelia Earhart and Paul Mantz as they came in for various parts for their aircraft.
Wiley Post's Lockheed Vega ÒWinnie MaeÓ, one of the stamps, featured jettisonable landing gear to boost streamlining for the long legs of cross-country flights. When it came time to land and refuel, a foot-wide landing skid was extended. Dean mentioned that Post's first attempt across the United States ended at Muroc Dry Lake, only some 57 miles from where he'd started in Burbank. Wally showed a photo of himself wearing the helmet to an underwater diving suit that Post later wore to establish an altitude record in ÒWinnie MaeÓ, and said the pioneering Post had been his mentor in aviation.
A stamp of a Piper J-2 and a J-3 reminded Dean of planes he flew when he was 16 - - a Stearman, of his training in the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP). A Waco stamp proved to be an icon of an accident that threatened to derail young DeanÕs flying career.
"I was out in the Mojave desert town of Baker, enrolled in the CPTP, when my instructor attempted some low altitude aerobatics in a Waco UPF-7 biplane. He was trying to impress a highway motorist. The plane never completed its loop, and we crashed. I broke my back (in three places), had a broken shoulder and fractured ribs."
But, it was the Boeing 314 stamp which highlighted Wally's true passion for flying with Pan American Airways. Ironically, the tail number on the stamp's flying boat image was 18605, matching he number on the scale model Wally brought.
Delayed by his injuries, Wally finally did make it to flying boats in 1943. Through CPTP, he got his commercial license and instructor's rating, and a week past his 20th birthday went to Pan Am, as a Fifth Officer. Relocated on Terminal Island in 1939, Pan Am's facilities were busy nearly around the clock, with Boeing, Martin and Sikorsky flying boats taxiing in from landings on the bay and back out for takeoffs.
Dean told of how Pan Am prepared for the possibility of war in 1941, with Clipper crews carrying sealed instructions on how to get the flying boats to safety once hostilities began.
December 7th's attack on Pearl Harbor saw Pan Am's Clippers scattered around the world. One Clipper en route from San Francisco to Honolulu diverted to Hilo, Hawaii. Before it could return to San Francisco, the crew worked a day-and-a-half loading more than 2000 gallons of fuel by hand from 5-gallon cans.
Another Clipper, an S-42, wasn't so lucky. Fully loaded at the pier in Hong Kong, the flying boat was about to be boarded by the crew when Japanese fighters swooped in to strafe. In a few seconds, the airplane was under water, stranding the crew without any personal belongings. Overnight, they were flown by DC-2 to China, where Dean says, "they landed on a dirt strip at a walled city. They had to light oil drums to mark the runway and ended up staying there for ten days. None of the Chinese spoke English, none of the crew spoke Chinese and they didn't know what they were eating."
The crew finally crossed China and Burma and got to Calcutta, where they caught another Clipper back to the United States.
While the Pacific Clipper ended up flying around the world to avoid falling under Japanese attack, the Philippine Clipper aided forces stationed on Wake Island by making a special reconnaissance flight, before carrying all the Pan Am employees off Wake.
Wally started as fifth officer ("not bow-boy") on Boeing Clippers for Pan Am, securing docking lines on the flying boats when they landed. One of his early joys involved Capt. John Hamilton, known for his one-upmanship, who was taking off for a flight to Honolulu. He took the flying boat under the Bay Bridge twice, waggled its wings as he passed San Francisco's piers and then flew under the Golden Gate Bridge.
As the war progressed, Dean and his fellow Pan Am pilots flew Martin Mars and Consolidated Coronado flying boats (48,000 and 72,000 lbs., respectively) in the South Pacific. On some of his island hops to forward areas, Wally remembers well having to crawl into a slit trench in the middle of the night, "listening to the distinctive sound of 'Washing Machine Charlie' overhead, disturbing everyone's rest with a few bombs."
By the end of his career with Pan American, Dean had flown DC-3s, -4s, -6s, -7s, the Boeing Stratocruisers, Boeing 707 and 727 airliners. He confessed the favorite part of his career involved slipping from his captain's chair into the passenger compartment. "I enjoy talking to people, as you can tell. I'd open the door and talk to every passenger, which is very illegal, but I did it."