Copter Lands Amid Flames, Saves Aviator : Rescue: Lauretta Foy, 80, took refuge in her pool as fire reached her Santa Monica Mountains home.

In a dramatic helicopter rescue by one of her former students, famed aviator Lauretta Foy, 80, was plucked from her swimming pool as raging fire burned her hilltop home high in the Santa Monica Mountains.

“The pilot did a very good job in landing his helicopter between two houses and right near my mother’s swimming pool,” said Jim Foy of Hermosa Beach, the oldest son of a onetime Busby Berkeley dancer in films who flew cross-country during World War II with planes destined for U.S. Allies.

“She’s OK; she didn’t suffer any injury,” Foy said. He said he did not know the name of the pilot. His mother was resting at an undisclosed location.

Foy said the pilot landed his craft between two houses near the edge of the pool where his mother had taken refuge from the flames. The six-room, solar-heated house stands on a 2.4-acre lot on Mildas Drive about 2,400 feet above sea level.

Barbara London, a friend who flew with Foy ferrying airplanes around the country during World War II, said she had talked with Foy by telephone a week ago when fires were scattered throughout Southern California, including a part of Malibu.

“She didn’t seem concerned then because the fire was not near her,” London said. “She said that brush had been cleared well from around her house.”

London was concerned that some 50 years of her friend’s memorabilia might have been lost in the fire. The home was reported to have been destroyed.

“She wrote a book on the first part of her life, through World War II, and she gave me a galley-proof copy of it, just in case she lost her copy,” said London, who lives in Long Beach. “She is an outstanding, talented lady.”

In 1979, Foy won approval from the Regional Planning Commission to have a helicopter landing pad built on her lot--just in case she and her neighbors needed to be rescued from fire or other emergencies. She said then that her house was reachable only by a one-way dirt road.

The landing pad was built but never used, said Jim Foy.

When World War II broke out, Lauretta Beaty already had been a movie stand-in for Loretta Young and other actresses, and was living with her parents in Van Nuys. She was following the war exploits of her younger brother, Greg, who had joined Britain’s Royal Air Force. Her brother had taken the name Gregory Augustus Daymond and was dubbed “Baby Eagle” in downing several Nazi planes.

She had taken up flying light planes for fun, but was recruited by a Piper airplane dealership in 1940 to talk to women’s clubs about the safety of flying. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she eventually joined the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS), then the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots (WASP).

In 1985, she joined 40 other former U.S. and Russian World War II pilots for a television-linked reunion in San Diego and Moscow marking the 40th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe.

After marrying pilot Bob Foy in 1945, she and her husband went to work for North American Aviation. She eventually became a test pilot and instructor. She won the annual Powder Puff Derby women’s air race from San Diego to Miami in 1949.

She cut back on flying after her husband was killed in a 1950 plane crash, and she joined a stock brokerage firm in 1950. But in 1961 a friend introduced her to helicopters, and by the next year she was certified as a helicopter pilot.