WORKING IN L.A. / PILOT EXAMINER : She’s on Cloud 9

Claire Walters is a 68-year-old grandmother. She is also a pilot examiner for the Federal Aviation Administration--a job normally held by men about half her age.

About 20 times a month, Walters clambers into the cockpit to put an aviation school graduate through the paces, testing skills in a series of aerobatic maneuvers to make sure the applicant is fully qualified to serve as a pilot in command.

Despite her age and diminutive size, Walters is especially well suited for the job.

With more than 38,000 hours in the cockpit, she is one of the most experienced pilots--male or female--in the world, far outstripping most airline pilots, who average about half that much time.

Besides that, Walters is tough and she is strong.

That is important because some candidates seated beside her have been known to get a death grip on the dual controls when the plane was in trouble.

“One of those fellows was a great big guy,” she recalled with a grin. “Didn’t listen to anything I said.

“On takeoff, he kept pulling the nose up and up--we were heading for a stall,” she said. “He kept pulling back (on the control wheel) with his arms and I kept pushing forward as hard as I could with mine. I finally managed to get my knee on it, too.

“It turned out OK,” she said. “I out-muscled him.”

Once again, Walters had survived a line of work that she has thought--”lots of times”--might claim her life.

But did she ever, in her more than 51 years in the cockpit, flying everything from World War II bombers to modern corporate jets, regret having chosen her life as a pilot?

“Never,” she said firmly. “I might have done a lot of other things, and I could have made a lot more money, but I never would have had as much fun.”

Walters attributes it all to “falling out of my crib on my head when I was a baby.”

“I decided right then that I’d better learn how to fly,” she said. “I talked about it in kindergarten and I talked about it in grade school. Every time I saw a plane up there, I knew I wanted to be up there too.”

Walters said that when she was 13, she and her twin sister, Betty, grew some corn behind the family home in Garden Grove and sold it at a roadside stand.

“We got enough money from that to buy a pig, and after we’d raised the pig we sold it for enough to buy a ride in a Stearman (biplane),” she said. “That ride was everything I’d hoped for and more.”

After graduating from high school, Walters got a job at a cannery to pay for flying lessons.

“You want to know how badly I wanted to learn?” she asked. “I was making 35 cents an hour at my job, and it cost $7.50 an hour to learn how to fly.”

A few months later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and all private aviation within 100 miles of the West Coast was halted because of World War II. Walters moved to Arizona, where she continued her training, getting a private license in 1943 and a commercial rating a year later.

She soon found work as a ferry pilot, delivering military aircraft throughout the United States.

“There weren’t a lot of airfields then, so I learned to land on roads,” she said.

In 1946, a year after the war ended, Walters got her first job as an instructor.

“First they let me teach the women,” she said. “Then I got the leftovers, the men that the male instructors didn’t want to fly with. Then the students started asking for me and I got everyone.”

A year later, Walters was part of a group that re-established the Powder Puff Derby, an air race for women. In 1948, she competed in the race for the first time. In 1951, she and Frances Bera won it.

That was the same year she married one of her students, Mike Walters, who went on to become a command pilot with Capitol Airways, a charter airline. She kept busy flying until two weeks before her son, Mike Jr., arrived in 1952.

“He had 750 hours under his belt--and mine--before he was born,” she said. “Sixteen years later, he soloed.”

Her daughter, Betty, was born in 1955.

Five years after that, Walters and a partner, Betty Faux, started the Claire Walters Flight Academy at Santa Monica Airport. The flight school lasted 27 years, graduating thousands of pilots.

Since 1987, Walters’ flying time has largely involved her work as a designated examiner, testing candidates to see if they are ready for their FAA licenses as private pilots.

Although the success rate is fairly high, most candidates are a bit nervous at their moment of truth. Walters helps by switching to her chatty, easygoing grandmotherly mode.

First comes an hour or more of testing on the ground--questions about meteorology, FAA regulations, airplane maintenance and the like.

With charts spread on a table, Walters talks the candidate through a hypothetical flight, having him calculate the best route, the best altitude, fuel consumption, airspeed and where he would put down if something went wrong.

“Over here,” one candidate said, pointing triumphantly to a large dry lake north of Barstow that would afford an easy landing.

“But that’s 20 miles from the nearest road,” the ever-practical Walters said. “That’s a long way to walk in the desert.”

When the going gets heavy, she lightens it up with stories from her past--the time she ferried a small plane across the vast Pacific to Australia, the time she had to land on the desert at night without any lights, the time her engine quit.

The classroom part of the examination is followed by another hour or longer in the air, during which Walters has the candidate perform a series of maneuvers that include takeoffs, climbs, turns, descents and landings, all of which must be accomplished with precision and according to her instructions.

This is the nerve-racking part for the candidate, but Walters remains unflappable--her voice unfailingly calm, her demeanor serene.

If the candidate makes a mistake--and there are few who do not--Walters advises, but never scolds.

If the weeks of instruction begin to evaporate in a haze of confusion, Walters reassures and explains.

If the situation gets a bit tense, Walters smoothes things out with a wisecrack.

“One guy asked me how he was doing,” she recalled. “I told him he’d just set aviation back 60 years.”