Flying Life

The Flying Lifeis the life story ofourfather, 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 pilots 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 pilotsone 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 aircraftfrom 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 planes wings had sustained heavy damage and had even fallen offbut 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 thunderstormwith the task of finding out what was causing the crash.And find out he didlosing his burning plane in the process and bailing out over rural Virginia. Surprisingly, it wasnt 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 ableat the age of eighty-nineto 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 injuriesto him or anyone else. He made that nights six oclock news.Ourfather loved to fly. His book is a love letter to aeronauticsand a great read!