John Myers, a business executive and renowned test pilot during World War II whose extraordinary flying skills earned him the nickname “Maestro,” died Thursday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 96.

As chief engineering test pilot for Northrop Corp. during the war, Myers most notably performed experimental test flights on the P-61 Black Widow, America’s first successful night fighter, and on the first flying wing.

“For us, he was a legend of legends,” Barron Hilton, hotel magnate and aviation enthusiast, said in a statement Friday. “He was truly a pioneer and inspired many test pilots who looked up to him as their idol.”

Gen. Chuck Yeager, the legendary test pilot who met Myers in 1945 as a young test pilot, agreed. “He was about 10 years older and a role model for all of us pilots,” Yeager said in a statement. “We always looked up to him.”

“John Myers was a true pioneer and legend of aviation who throughout his entire career demonstrated his exceptional flying abilities in all types of aircraft,” Gen. Jack Dailey, director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, told the Los Angeles Times on Friday.

During the war, Myers nearly died test-flying one prototype aircraft that never made it to production because of its performance. “In fact,” Dailey said, “he told Jack Northrop it wouldn’t fly.” But as chief test pilot, “he said, ‘If anybody’s going to fly it, it’s going to be me.’ He did it, and he was lucky to survive the crash.” He reputedly held the record for surviving more crashes than any other pilot.

Back then, Dailey said, “They didn’t really know if those airplanes would fly or not. They didn’t have the computer simulations and sophisticated wind-tunnel data we have today.”

Dailey said Myers’ philosophy “was that you have to go for it, and you always have to have your head a little bit out the window, meaning you’re hanging it out there a bit.”

He was 90 when he gave up flying his Cessna Citation II SP jet. A year before that, Myers took his friend Bill Tilley up in his jet for a flight over Yosemite, with Tilley sitting in the co-pilot’s seat that normally was occupied by Myers’ black Labrador retriever, Gus, who this time sat in the rear passenger seat.

They were on their way back over the Sierra when the 89-year-old Myers turned to Tilley and said, “I’d like to give you something to talk about.”

And that, Tilley recalled Friday, “is when he barrel-rolled his airplane. I said, ‘That’s a great thrill, John, but please don’t do it again. Once is enough.'”

It wasn’t until Myers was 93 that he retired from flying his jet helicopter.

John Wescott Myers was born June 13, 1911, in Los Angeles. His father, Louis W. Myers, became chief justice of the California Supreme Court. Myers attended Stanford and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1936, and embarked on a career in entertainment law. Among his early clients were Bing Crosby, Gene Autry, and Paramount Pictures.

His passion for flying began in 1930 while he was still an undergraduate at Stanford. In 1940, he became assistant general counsel at Lockheed, where he began ferrying planes to New York and New Orleans for overseas delivery.

In 1941, he became chief engineering test pilot at Northrop, for which he became senior vice president and director after the war. After the war, he became chairman and principal stockholder of Pacific Airmotive Corp., which adapted conventional aircraft to turbine power and which he later sold to Purex. In 1970, he formed Airflite, a fixed-base aviation services facility at Long Beach Airport, which he sold to Toyota in the late 1980s.

Myers, who owned an 18,000-acre cattle ranch outside Merced in Central California, was known as a passionate outdoorsman and an environmentalist who donated 5,000 acres of land in the Merced area to the Nature Conservancy.