Friday, January 27, 2023
Peter Goutiere, 108, Katonah resident and pilot who flew 680 missions over the Himalayas
By JEFF MORRIS
Peter J. Goutiere, 108, died at home in Katonah on Jan. 22.
He was born Sept. 28, 1914, in India, son of British immigrants George Henry de Goutiere and Alicia (Wintel) Goutiere. His father was a superintendent of police in an area outside New Delhi.
At age 14, after the death of his father, Mr. Goutiere moved with his mother and his sister to Bangor, Maine, following his other sister, Christine Weston, who moved to Maine after marrying a local businessman.
Mr. Goutiere graduated from Brewer High School in his early 20s, after dropping out for a few years, and married his former English teacher, Helen Brimmer, in Maine in 1939. The couple had one child, David, and later divorced. Also in 1939, he enrolled at the University of Maine, became an American citizen, and signed up with the Civilian Pilot Training Program, where he began training in Bangor.
From 1943 until 1947, Mr. Goutiere was one of the American pilots for China National Aviation Corporation, owned in part by Pan American Airways, who helped transport troops, food, fuel and other supplies into China after Japan severed China’s only land supply routes through Burma.
Mr. Goutiere was featured in a 2019 Christian Science Monitor story on World War II pilots, commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-Day. They recounted their first missions flying C-47 Dakotas, the twin-engine military transports they called “Daks.” “The C-47 was a luxury aeroplane. It had everything,” Mr. Goutiere was quoted in the article. He added that in 1944, during his training in Miami, he was “almost mesmerized” when he saw the Dak he was scheduled to fly to Europe and beyond.
According to the story, Mr. Goutiere didn’t fly a mission during D-Day, but as a pilot known as the “Himalayan Rogue,” he flew “an astonishing 680 missions ‘over the Hump’ during WWII,” describing it as “one of the most notoriously deadly supply routes over China, Burma and India.” The story said pilots also called this flight path the “Aluminum Trail,” a reference to the fact that more than 600 planes and 1,000 men were lost in the area.
“The Hump” was the name Allied pilots gave the airlift operation that crossed the Himalayan foothills into China.
“Himalayan Rogue” became the name of a book Mr. Goutiere published in 1994.
Mr. Goutiere was modest in describing his WWII experience. In correspondence he wrote in 2001, he said, “I started flying as capt. for CNAC in April ‘43 and quit them in June of ‘47. I made 680 trips across the ‘Hump’ which was par for the course. I should have had more, but was delayed in the States for a couple extra months to pick up my plane to ferry back to Calcutta. I was away for four and half months in the States.”
In the 2019 story, Mr. Goutiere said he still remembered his first flight over the Hump, and a special moment he took as he flew over Agra, India, the location of the Taj Mahal. He said there was a little building on the Ganges River where he lived when he was 5 or 6 years old. “So I got permission to circle around my village, that building that I once lived in so long ago, and where my father died,” said the then-104-year-old pilot. “Then I saluted my wings, for my father.”
He became the personal pilot and friend for Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II, and after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, he worked transporting pilgrims by plane to the Hajj in Mecca. In the 1950s, Mr. Goutiere moved to Jordan at the request of Hussein bin Talal, who he helped get certified on the Boeing 707. He worked in Beirut for six years before moving on to become a pilot for an airline in Ghana.
His second marriage, in the 1940s, also ended in divorce.
In 1962, Mr. Goutiere returned to the U.S. and began working for the Federal Aviation Administration. In 1973, his work took him to Lebanon, but the Lebanese civil war forced him to leave with only the clothes on his back in November 1975. Later, he was transferred by the FAA to New York, where he worked until his retirement.
He is survived by his third wife, Evelyn, whom he married in 1987. The couple had two children, Christian and Hannah. Other survivors include a grandson, Miles Soboleski. Information on other survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Goutiere’s family held a Zoom party for him in September 2020 on his 106th birthday. Six of his former Pan Am colleagues drove past his Katonah house, in front of which a large banner had been erected.
His family will receive friends today Friday, Jan. 27, from 3 to 6 p.m., at Clark Associates Funeral Home, located at 4 Woods Bridge Road, Katonah, concluding with a memorial service at 6 p.m.
Interment will be private.
