Grover Clinton Tyler

Career

Tyler is one of two pilots that started service with the Pacific Air Transport in 1926 flying along the west coast between Canada and Mexico. He is credited with flying the last leg, from Portland to Seattle, Washington, of a historic five-leg trip between Los Angeles, California, and Seattle, establishing the flight of the Pacific Coast Airways. Landing his biplane at Gorst Field, he handed over the first sack of mail on this new commercial route to Postmaster C. M. Perkins on 15 September 1926. To prepare the route for night flying Tyler and fellow pilot Arthur Starbuck, the other original pilot staff of PAT, drove an old Ford up and down the San Joaquin Valley setting up airway beacon lights with a pick and shovel. By 1928 the PAT had become a unit of Boeing Systems and Tyler continued flying the mail as well as passengers on this new route he had helped to establish.

Flight incident

On the night of March 2, 1931, while flying along the very route he had helped establish, a fire broke out on board his aircraft, a Boeing 40-B-4, and Tyler had to make an emergency landing near Roseburg, Oregon. For his actions that night President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on 29 October 1935 presented Tyler, along with 6 other pilots, with the Airmail Flyers' Medal of Honor. This very deed was later chronicled on the well known "Wheaties" cereal box as part of a 1930s era series regarding the Air Mail Flyers Medal of Honor recipients.

Medal citation

For extraordinary achievement while piloting air mail plane No. C-741 on the night of March 2, 1931, on a flight from Seattle, Wash. To San Diego, Calif. when about nine miles south of Glide, Oregon, about 11 p.m., Pilot Tyler discovered that smoke was coming from the underside of the plane in the vicinity of the mail compartment. The smoke was almost immediately followed by flames. The plane at the time was over a mountainous region and the nearest clearing the pilot remembered was in the vicinity of Glide. He returned to it and landed the plane in a clump of small pliant trees. The wings were caught by the trees and were torn from the body of the plane. This served to break the force of the landing so that the passengers were not seriously injured. One passenger received a few cuts about the face and another burned his hands slightly in handling a hot fire extinguisher. Pilot Tyler helped the passengers from the plane and with their assistance removed the mall load of 319 pounds from the plane. The burning pouches were thrown into the swampy ground which extinguished the fire and saved the mail except for charred edges and water damage. The fire in the mail compartment of the plane was then quenched with fire extinguishers and the water in the swampy area in which the plane landed.

Death

Tyler died in 1966 just months after attending the dedication of a fountain at 5500 W. Marginal Way S. W. in Portland, Oregon marking the location of his historic landing 40 years earlier.