Ladies, Start Your Engines

By Ann K. Williams
Staff Writer

August 8 -- Frances Bera sat stock still, intently studying a black bound notebook resting on the edge of the table in front of her. Beyond her was a picture window overlooking the runway at Santa Monica Airport.

“This is the epitome of a true racer,” Pat Prentiss said, pointing to the short, strong 80-year-old as Bera closed her flight plan and took a moment to look out the window.

“Look at her ponder,” Prentiss said.

Bera gazed up at a calm blue sky lightly dotted by clouds drifting over the site where in 1929 Amelia Earhart and Pancho Barnes started the first transcontinental women’s air race popularly known as the Powder Puff Derby.

Frances Bera and co-pilot Roni MacPherson (Photos by Gene Williams)

Four years before that, thousands had gathered on what was then a grassy meadow to watch a fleet of Douglas biplanes take off for the first aerial circumnavigation of the globe.

But Bera was focused on the here and now as she read the wind early Friday morning. The 36th annual Palms to Pines women’s air race had just been cleared to start and women dashed around her taking care of last minute details.

“Good luck, old buddy,” a woman who’d flown with her last year said quietly, leaning down and touching her shoulder.

Although Prentiss and her friends said the racers are excited and nervous before the race starts, Bera was unfazed.

“I just want to get it on the road,” she said, her deadpan delivery betrayed by her frank, bright eyes. “I’m always excited.”

The race from Santa Monica to Bend, Oregon -- the longest continuously running air race of any kind -- is the labor of love of Claire Walters, who, like Bera, has been racing for 55 years.

Friday’s racers are members of the Ninety-Nines, an international organization of women pilots founded by Earhart, Barnes and their sister racers shortly after the 1929 Women’s Air Derby landed in Cleveland, Ohio.

The pioneer aviators sent invitations to all 117 of the licensed women pilots in the United States and ninety-nine joined, hence the name. Prentiss is the current International Vice President of the Ninety-Nines.

Bera and Walters have made aviation history themselves.

Riding on a tailwind they’d caught by skirting a storm over Fort Worth -- a maneuver one of the younger women said took a lot of nerve and experience to even think about trying -- Bera and Walters sailed into Detroit to win the 1951 Powder Puff Derby. Bera went on to win the race six more times in the following decade.

She holds the altitude record for the Piper PA-23 Aztec, a small twin-engine plane that she took up over 40,000 feet above the Owens Valley. That’s nearly eight miles up, where the air is far too thin to breathe and the air pressure -- which holds the plane up -- is less than one-sixth that at sea level.

“The weather was clear,” Bera said about the flight. “I didn’t have any updraft. If I had I would have gone higher.”

As they got ready for Friday’s race, the Ninety-Nines joked about male pilots and their attitudes. They once organized a mixed race, but the men were too competitive, Walters said.

“The men wouldn’t even talk to us,” Prentiss said later. “Were they tense. At the very end, one male team placed. Then they got real friendly.”

“We’re serious during the race, and then we have a lot of fun afterwards,” Walters said.

Walters -- who’s logged more than 38,000 hours in the air -- ran the Claire Walters Flight Academy at the Santa Monica Airport for 27 years.

In addition to teaching thousands men and women, many of whom went on to fly for major airlines and for the Air Force, she taught her husband to fly.

“I met him when he came in on the GI bill in the late forties,” Walters said. “It was a miserable experience. He wanted to be the boss in the airplane.

“I told him I was going to be the boss in the airplane,” she said. “He could be the boss on the ground.”

When asked whether it was difficult to excel in what many saw as a man’s field, Bera said, “I didn’t realize I was not liberated. Nobody told me. I didn’t know any better.”

Bera, who started flying when she was 16, takes a different younger woman up with her each year to introduce her to the race, explained Prentiss. Then she “pushes them out of the nest” to make room for her next apprentice.

In the past ten years, she’s won half of the Palms to Pines races, come in second in four, and third in one. The course is nearly 800 miles long, and speeds average 140 miles per hour, though Bera has made the trip in four hours.

Walters didn’t fly this year in the race she first organized decades ago -- one of only three she’s missed -- but she was at her post at the sign-in table Wednesday as women flew in to the airport and registered for the race in the small Airport lobby. They were laughing and talking, happy to get together again.

Claire Walters surrounded by her sister pilots

Younger women filled the seats around Walter’s table so they could listen to her “war stories.”

“What you’re hearing is history,” whispered one while Walters was explaining the real truth about Amelia Earhart’s last flight.

“That is the biggest scam that ever hit the Pacific Ocean,” Walters said, referring to the many theories about Earhart’s whereabouts.

Earhart had a “poor radio” and she was aiming for a coral island that was only a few feet above sea level, Walters said.

Walters should know. She’s flown over the much of the same route, once flying solo in a small twin engine plane from Oakland to Australia.

“It’s always cloudy out there,” she said. “That’s the way it always was, that’s the way it always is.

“You can’t shoot the sun if it ain’t there,” Walters said, explaining why Earhart couldn’t have navigated by the sun.

As for the air strip’s radio transmitter, “I wouldn’t put it past them to have turned it off,” she said, because the generators that powered the beacons made “a horrible amount of noise.

“She went down in the ocean,” was Walters’ conclusion. “It’s very easy to get lost. Big airliners get lost.”

Earhart’s mother agreed. “There’s too much ocean,” she once told Walters.

After two days of camaraderie and good stories, the race was finally underway at 9 Friday morning.

The sometimes foggy weather decided to cooperate.

“Mother nature always listens to Claire,” said Prentiss with a smile of satisfaction before walking down to the end of the runway with her green signal flag.

“Ladies, start your engines,” came the call from the tower. One at time 15 small planes lifted into the sky as Walters sat on a bench outside watching peacefully.

The stock model planes were on their way to Red Bluff, California where the pilots would spend the night before flying to the finish line in Bend and the after-race party.

For those who’d like to hear more of Walter’s stories, or want to learn about flying, the Palms Chapter of the Ninety-Nines meets in the Barker Hangar conference room at Santa Monica Airport at 7:30 p.m. on the second Tuesday of each month.