The Flying Life

Book excerpt: The Flying Life is the life story of our father, Stefan Cavallo, a test pilot at Langley Field during World War II, who passed away peacefully on September 25, 2022, at 101. While attending the School of Aeronautical Engineering at New York University, he also took flying lessons at Teterboro Airfield in New Jersey through a government-sponsored program and graduated with a combination aeronautical engineering degree and pilot’s license in April 1942, just five months after Pearl Harbor. He was immediately picked up by NACA (a precursor of NASA) and became one of their civilian test pilots—one of only five men. He had a remarkable seventy-five-year career in aviation. As a NACA test pilot for six years, three of them during the war, he flew and tested every version of the P51 Mustang (the A, B, D, and H prototypes) as well as dozens of other aircraft—from rocket-powered planes to amphibians and helicopters. Late in the war, when P51s were escorting B47 bombers over Germany, we discovered that we were mysteriously losing too many of the fighter planes in thunderstorms over Europe: the P51s went down while the B47s came safely home. The NACA pilots were given the assignment of determining the cause of these failures: most of the pilots and engineers were convinced that the plane’s wings had sustained heavy damage and had even fallen off—but the planes went down over enemy territory so there was no way to know for sure. A test was designed to see if NACA could solve the mystery. Stefan Cavallo, my father, was assigned to fly a P51 deliberately into a thunderstorm—with the task of finding out what was causing the crash. And find out he did—losing his burning plane in the process and bailing out over rural Virginia. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the wings that were the problem; it was the engine, which caught fire almost immediately in the windstorm. After he left NACA, Stefan Cavallo continued test-flying for about five years with EDO, a seaplane manufacturing company, and then retired from commercial aviation. In June 2010, while flying his Cessna 210, his engine seized five miles off the Long Island coastline. He was able—at the age of eighty-nine—to make a dead-stick landing in between a heavily populated beach and a full parking lot, in a very small patch of sand. There were no injuries—to him or anyone else. He made that night’s six o’clock news. Our father loved to fly. His book is a love letter to aeronautics—and a great read!