The Flying Life

By Stefan A. Cavallo

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!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9798888320884

Book preview

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The Flying Life

Stefan A. Cavallo

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 1

I Didn’t Think Twice

All along, I loved airplanes. So did all the boys at Our Lady of Mercy Elementary School in the Bronx.

And that was okay with my father, who had come to this country from Northern Italy around the turn of the twentieth century and started an upholstery business in New York City. Pop was interested in making money; it was why he had left Italy—there was no money in Italy—and he realized that airplanes, new as they were and on their way to revolutionize transportation, were a good business opportunity.

Pop was interested in business opportunities. He made a point of telling me that if I wanted to go to college and study something associated with planes and aviation, he would pay for it. Aeronautics was practical. Liberal arts or law was not practical and, therefore, not an option.

All this sounded great to me.

*****

One of the games I got one Christmas when I was in high school was a portable pool table. My father liked to play pool too, and for a while we had a lot of fun together. But I soon found out that the table—wonderfully long and wide—was a great place for making model airplanes: I could really spread out!

Airplane models in those days were cut out of sheets of thin wood and blocks of balsa. The blocks were glued together into a skeleton onto which a thin skin of rice paper was applied and which was then coated with a lacquer or dope, which would shrink tightly around the frame, resulting in a drum-tight surface. The surface was then decorated to look like one of the more famous World War I squadrons such as the French Lafayette Escadrille or the Shooting Stars of Captain Ray Brooks’ American Squadron.

I continued to make model airplanes all the way up to college. My parents hung my models over the pool table, and they were left on display even after I had stopped making them, and even after the pool table had been thrown away. I think they dried out eventually; they finally fell apart.

*****

With Pop’s approval then, I applied to the New York University Guggenheim School of Aeronautical Engineering in the Bronx, just a short commute away from our apartment on 197th Street. It is remarkable to me even now that one of the few schools in the country that offered a degree in aeronautics in the ’30s was at the University Heights campus of NYU. I could commute to college and continue to live at home!

NYU’s University Heights campus was on a hill overlooking the Hudson and, beyond the river, the Jersey Palisades. The School of Aeronautical Engineering had a wind tunnel, an aeronautical laboratory, and a curriculum taught by noted professors. Prominent among them was Professor Alexander Klemin, a Russian immigrant who had learned aeronautics in Russia during and after World War I and who emigrated to the United States when the Russians turned to communism. He had quite a heavy accent, which was a little hard to listen to, but he was a great teacher. He claimed that he had read all the major technical aeronautical bulletins that had been published up to that time, most of which were reports and technical notes from NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) at Langley Field, Virginia. NACA was the outstanding American laboratory for aeronautical research.

Klemin was proficient in Russian, German, French, and English and was a potent source of information at a time when it was possible to read most of the aeronautical laboratory papers being published worldwide. And he had an unconventional sense of humor. Once when he was on the subject of stress analysis of an aircraft’s longeron—the main longitudinal brace or support of the fuselage of an airplane—he realized that between his accent and the integral and differential calculus involved, we were all beginning to look at him with glazed eyes. So he finally said, Let’s stop thinking about the loads the airplane would place on the longeron and let’s figure out how much a beam would bend if a bird landed in the middle of it. Somehow this became a problem we could actually do! The bird sitting in the middle of the beam was the same type of problem as the stress on the longeron; it just had a lot more zeroes after the decimal point.

I think his biggest contribution to our education, and my favorite memory of him, was just before graduation. Our graduate term paper consisted of the drawings and structural analysis of an airplane that we had designed ourselves. He looked over each of our submissions and then said, Anyvun dat builds und flies vun of dees airplanes—will be killed! And he advised us that our four years of aeronautical education simply told us where the information was—but that we all had a long, long way to go.

In 1940, when I was a sophomore at NYU, the aeronautics department circulated to all of us in the program a pamphlet, which contained an offer. Anybody who wanted to learn how to fly could take lessons at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey—for free! It was becoming more and more apparent that the war in Europe was coming closer, and the government wanted to build up the US Air Force. I signed up immediately; I didn’t think twice.

Teterboro was on the other side of the Hudson River. I could drive there; I had a car. My older sister, Yone, had given me my first car when I was seventeen; she gave me $35 out of her secretary’s salary to buy a Ford convertible Model A, which I loved. It was painted black with red trim, and it had whitewall tires and a rumble seat. The spare tire was in a wheel well in one of the front fenders. It was gorgeous! I wish I still had it.

The minimum driving age in New York was eighteen, and I was only seventeen, so Yone arranged for me to use the New Jersey address of a young man she was dating, which made it possible for me to get a New Jersey license.

Yone was my first passenger in that car; she had come with me to the dealer when I bought it. (She was also my first passenger in an airplane when I got my pilot’s license in 1941.)

Interestingly, my mother was in favor of my learning to fly and supplied the money for my commute. I could get there either by way of the George Washington Bridge or by a ferry, which left from New York City at 125th Street. The fare was twenty-five cents for a car and driver on the ferry and fifty cents for a car and driver on the bridge.

The field-based operator at Teterboro, as well as the pilot in the Civilian Pilot Training Program, was a man named Ed Gorski, who had been Amelia Earhart’s mechanic. Our primary training was in a small high wing airplane, one type called the Yellow Cubs (also referred to as the Yellow Peril) and a second, similar plane called the Aeronca Champs. The Aeronca Champ had a sixty-five-horsepower engine, which was just enough power to take off and climb on a hot summer day with two passengers on board. And on a cold winter day, it had to be hand-propped to be started, which could be quite a challenge. Both planes had a tandem arrangement in which the student sat in the front with the instructor behind him. In about ten to twelve hours of dual instruction, we were supposed to be experienced enough to solo, and after thirty hours of solo flying, we were permitted to take the written exam and do a solo flight to get our pilot’s license. I was awarded my airman’s license, No. 76006-41, in the spring of 1941. These five-digit numbers became so low, as the cadre of private pilots grew, that they didn’t show up on the FAA’s list of general aviation pilots after World War II when the FAA began using the pilots’ six-digit social security numbers as a license number. I found out about this seventy years later when the FAA tried to look up my resume and couldn’t find my license because their computers weren’t programmed to find pilots’ license numbers with less than nine digits.

The primary flying course took place over about six months, after which those of us who wanted to continue moved on to the secondary course, which consisted of training in acrobatic flying. It was flown in a larger, open cockpit, World War I look-alike biplane, which was either a Waco UPF-7 or a Stearman, both of which had 220-horsepower engines. The student sat in front, in an open cockpit, and the instructor sat behind him in a separate open cockpit.

We did all kinds of acrobatics in those planes. There was one maneuver called a falling leaf in which the plane descends in a stalled condition, alternately rolling right and left, while remaining upright and headed in one direction. Then one turns and does it again in the opposite direction. It takes fast rudder reversal and coordinated application on the part of the pilot to make this a smooth rocking motion maneuver while descending. We had always practiced this maneuver at a high altitude, and I wasn’t particularly aware of the amount of altitude that could be lost in a falling leaf. As I found out later, it is about one thousand feet per cycle. Anyway, one day when I returned to Teterboro alone at about five thousand feet, I thought this would be a great time to practice a falling leaf. So I started the maneuver at five thousand feet, and by watching the horizon rock back and forth but without counting the cycles or looking at the altimeter, I descended through a few of these cycles and was not aware of the height I had lost until I decided to stop and see how much further I still had to go in my descent. Incredibly, and to my heart-stopping surprise, I was right at the end of the runway I intended to land at, with only about two hundred feet of altitude, and exactly lined up for a landing. It was a shock and a surprise, and it was also dumb luck! I never forgot the experience or appreciated my guardian angel more than on that day—and the many times he has been with me since.

We spent eighty hours of flying lessons in the secondary course, learning how to do a range of acrobatic movements and precision flying. The training was very good, and we could consider ourselves competent in acrobatic flying when we had completed this phase.

Teterboro had three runways, of which two were dirt and one, which ran approximately north and south, was paved with asphalt. However, this hard-surfaced strip was plagued with low spots, grass tufts, and recurring sinkholes. In 1940 the Army Air Corps, as it was known at the time, brought in six Bell P-39 Airacobra fighter-type pursuit planes and stationed them permanently on the field, evidently to defend against an attack on New York City. The pilots who flew these little fighters were heroes in my eyes, as they were required to operate out of a single paved runway with two short intersecting turf strips. The P-39s were constantly damaging their landing gear in the potholes during takeoffs and landings and even when taxiing. On a couple of occasions, they even lost part of their landing gear on touchdown. One of the wheels, usually one of the main wheels, would hit a pothole and just rip right off, leaving the pilot to hold the plane straight by using the brake judiciously on the good wheel, with one wing dragging on the ground. A first lieutenant was in charge of the six planes, and he was the greatest looking macho image of a military pilot I had ever seen up to that time. He looked as if he was in his middle twenties. He wore a leather helmet with pull-down goggles and a fleece-lined leather jacket with cowboy-style boots all year round. When he and his group climbed into their small streamlined pursuit planes and flew off somewhere, it was an occasion to remember, and we would all line up to watch. Every once in a while, the lieutenant would ask us if we’d like a hamburger, after which he’d get into his plane and fly off for about an hour and bring them back to us still warm.

One day, during the flight training program at Teterboro, a contingent of us NYU flying students decided to see what float plane flying was all about. We’d heard that there was a place where you could rent a plane on floats, on the Hackensack River near the Teterboro airport. Considering the fact that we had not finished the secondary course yet, it was probably pretty rash to think we were ready to move on to another dimension in the field of flying, but I think at that point we all thought we could fly anything.

Anyhow, right down the road from Teterboro was a small seaplane operator with some ramps on the Hackensack River. This fixed base operator (FBO) was operating all year round because, happily, the New Jersey Power and Light company had built a power plant upriver from this base. The FBO used to tell us, laughing, how he had led the protest movement against the plant before it was built because he’d been sure the plant would pollute the river and create a visibility problem with the discharge from its coal-burning boilers. However, what he was actually afraid of was the plant’s tall chimneys, which he thought would be a hazard in low visibility conditions. However, after the plant was built and operating, the FBO became the biggest advocate the power plant ever had. The effluence was heating the water enough so that the river never froze as it had been prone to do, and the FBO was able to sell rides and rent seaplanes all year round. Furthermore, the tall chimneys were far enough away so that they did not interfere with the takeoff and landing pattern and actually made the seaplane base easy to find in the middle of the flatlands. As an added feature, the smoke from the tall chimneys acted like a wind sock and showed the wind direction needed for safe takeoffs and landings. The fixed base operator should have paid them to build it!

The charge for renting the sixty-five-horsepower two-seater Piper seaplane was $2 for half an hour. The pilot had to be prepared to start the engine by standing on the float while holding on to the wing strut with one hand and throwing the propeller down with the other until the engine started, at which point the pilot would jump into the front seat of the cockpit and take over the controls before the plane moved too far. It was necessary to start steering immediately because the airplane was underway as soon as the engine started. There are no brakes on a seaplane.

I had been rated to fly in land planes and had about a hundred hours of flight time from the primary course. So the seaplane FBO checked me out in a couple of rides and then let me rent the plane and fly it solo. He demonstrated crosswind takeoffs and landings and showed me how to taxi while dealing with a crosswind in a river with a running current at the same time.

The Hackensack River can get quite narrow and was maybe fifty feet wide, at most, at the site of the seaplane base. It varies from 30 feet to 150 feet as it winds its way through swampland and out to New York Harbor. The mafia garage people got very rich after the war when this useless swampland, which they had bought up and used for commercial garbage disposal, became the site of a football stadium and many huge industrial and commercial buildings, which had to be built on stilts. Birds and wildlife flourished there.

This bird-sanctuary garbage dump, which surrounded Teterboro Airport as well as the seaplane base, consisted of narrow creeks and crosswinds pouring off the top of high grass and was a challenging place to fly an underpowered seaplane; if you could fly in and out of that place, you could fly those seaplanes anywhere. A crosswind takeoff was always initiated by heading into the wind, no matter how narrow the creek was. The technique for taking off into a crosswind meant starting out heading toward the opposite bank and getting the plane up on the step (a notch in the surface of the bottom of the plane’s pontoons) as quickly as possible, thereby redirecting the hydrodynamic drag that prevents the plane from accelerating to takeoff speed. However, if you weren’t up on the step by the time you ran the width of the creek, you had to do a turn by rolling or banking the airplane up on one float, making a turn into the length of the river and into the wind, and continuing the takeoff run until you had enough airspeed to fly. Seaplane flying is the most exciting and challenging kind of flying for general aviation pilots. I learned things on the Hackensack River that I used throughout my flying life.

*****

I had been in the ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) for four years as a cadet captain at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, and I had continued in the ROTC at NYU, which was training a battalion of engineers and infantry. In the summer of 1941—the summer just after my junior year at NYU—I was sent, with the other aeronautics majors and a contingent of civil-engineering students, to Fort Belvoir in Virginia, the East Coast base for corps of engineers.

We were assigned to tents and cots and issued World War I uniforms and rifles. This gear, which had been in storage since the end of World War I had been pickled at the time it was stored. The first job they gave us cadets was cleaning off the thick, sticky yellow grease that had been applied to these 1903 Springfield rifles around 1920 and which had preserved them over all the years since. It was one heck of a job. It involved digging the preservative out of the nooks and crannies of every part of the weapon—with brushes, rags, and toothpicks.

The regular army officers wore flat-brimmed hats with a pinched crown, pearl-pink chino trousers, khaki-colored tunics, and sword belts with sabers when they were on parade. All of us, as cadet officers, had learned how to do a drill using a sword because it was part of the pass in review during the weekly ROTC parades at NYU. As soon as we arrived at Belvoir, as part of our uniform allotment, we were issued high-sided, thick-soled shoes that came up over our ankles and looked as if they were designed for trench warfare. They had been in storage for about twenty years, and as a consequence, they had completely dried out. When one walked through any puddles, the brittle stitching would shrink and break, and the soles would peel away from the body of the shoe. At first, this was a matter of concern to us, but our sergeant told us not to worry about the shoes. Just go ahead and get another pair from the supply depot, he said. Got plenty left over. On the other hand, there weren’t enough .30-caliber machine guns left over from the war to end all wars, so we were issued wooden rifles for drills and practice.

That summer at Fort Belvoir, when I was given the job to peel potatoes, I went at it the way we did back home, carefully peeling off the skin and digging out the eyes. When the cook saw me doing that, he grabbed the knife and demonstrated the army technique for peeling potatoes. This was to hack off the four sides like a guillotine, leaving the sides straight up and down and then cutting off the top and bottom the same way, leaving a six-sided squared-off remnant of about one-third the original size. His point was that there were plenty of potatoes in the army and not enough time. Don’t waste the time.

The Corps of Engineers at Fort Belvoir was all male, mostly in their early forties at the time of our summer training. However, we did have some female clerics and administrative people on the base, and of course, on visitors’ day, there would always be a surge of mothers and sisters. (There were no wives as yet.)

We had installed a bunch of Porta-Potties for the use of the visiting females. We were a bunch of young college kids, and we thought that mildly shocking practical jokes were hilarious. So the group that installed the toilets added speakers underneath the seats with wires leading to a microphone some distance away. When a young woman had gone into the portable toilet, just enough time was allowed for her to get comfortable, and then a voice would be heard from underneath the seat: Please move over. I’m painting in here. Needless to say, righteous indignation put a quick end to this fun.

At some point in my senior year, a recruiter from the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) had come by with applications for a job as an aeronautical engineer at the laboratory at Langley Field, Virginia. Along with most of the others in my class, I applied for the job.

Engineering jobs were scarce in 1941, and the good ones paid about $25 a week. The position they offered at the laboratory was as an aeronautical engineer at the entry level P-1 grade with pay of $2,000 a year. I submitted my application and never heard back. Eventually, I forgot about it.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and we were suddenly at war. I was in my senior year at NYU, with just six months to go to graduation. Actually, it was fewer than six months because graduation day was moved up from June to the last Friday in April because of the war.

The swearing in of new officers from the ROTC was to be on the day after graduation, a Saturday. We were to ship out to our new military assignments immediately and be at our bases by Monday.

Much to my surprise, a week before graduation and months after I had sent in my application, I received a telegram telling me I had been accepted for the job at Langley Field, working as a civilian employee. I telegraphed my acceptance but told them I was about to be sworn in as a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps—actually that Saturday.

On the last day of school, I got a telephone call from Langley Field saying that they had priority over the military; I should not take the oath to become an officer, but that upon graduation I should immediately proceed to Langley Field.

When the colonel who was the head of our ROTC unit heard about this, he had a fit and threatened to have me arrested if I accepted the offer. With some trepidation, I called NACA at Langley and spoke to the administration officer, who said, It’s your decision, but we have priority over the military. I asked him to send me a telegram to that effect, and it was promptly done. I stayed away from the swearing-in ceremony that Saturday and wondered during the next couple of days if MPs would come to the house to arrest me, but it turned out that the NACA admissions officer was right.

On Monday morning, after a weekend of packing and goodbyes, I loaded up my 1939 Ford V8 convertible and started for Langley Field. (I had sold the four-cylinder 1931 Model A my sister had bought for me just before I graduated from NYU, for which I got $35—the same price Yone had paid for it.)

After four years of military training in high school and four more at NYU, it seemed strange to be heading for a research lab as a civilian, especially because I did not feel that I qualified academically for a job at such a prestigious lab as NACA. I had gotten through engineering school with a lot of hard work and long hours of study, which a lot of the smart guys in the class hadn’t needed to do. There was a group of us from my class who had been selected to report to work at NACA, and one of these was Dick Dingeldein. He asked if he could ride down with me and split expenses. He was one of the brightest guys in the class and clearly excited about this chance to do pure research work. There were no interstate roads in those days, so we dragged down US 1, a federal highway that ran from Maine to Florida and passed through the centers of Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond. Route 1 varied in its width from two lanes to four and back again. We had started at the crack of dawn, but it was at least fourteen hours before we passed through Richmond and turned east to go down the peninsula toward Hampton, Virginia, and Newport News. Once we’d left the lights of Richmond, we were in an area where lighting was very limited because of the wartime restriction on showing lights of any kind. As a consequence, driving down those unlit roads, driving without seeing house lights and without seeing life of any kind was like being suspended in a world of silence. It was eerie!

Sometime after we started down the peninsula toward Hampton and Newport News, suddenly, out of the darkness, a motel appeared. It consisted of a motley collection of small buildings and signs out front saying Cabins For Rent, which we could just see by the light of our low-beam headlights. We were very tired. We stopped right away when we saw that welcoming sign. It turned out to be a colored motel, and the people running the place were just as startled to see us as we were to see them. We were shown to one of the units, which had a double bed and a black cast-iron Franklin stove. The stove was already full of wood, and the young Black guy who showed us the room pulled open the cast-iron door, threw some kerosene on the wood, tossed in a lighted match, and slammed the door shut. With a whoosh, there was instant heat. It was April, and it was cold, and the heat felt good. I don’t even remember if there was a toilet or water, but I think there was a pitcher with water and a ceramic bowl. I could have slept on the floor; I was so tired.

In the morning, we were out of there in a rush, again at the crack of dawn. It had cost us a dollar each for the night’s accommodation.

The next day, we arrived at Langley Field. I was able to get in touch with an engineer I knew, who was a graduate from a previous class at NYU. Bill Biebel was married with a wife and child and had rented a house in a town called Phoebus, which was about five miles from Langley, right on Chesapeake Bay. Bill was working as an engineer in the full-scale wind tunnel, doing aerodynamic research. Furthermore, he had a room for rent, and this was a very welcome, very big deal. Langley was beginning to be populated by incoming engineers, secretaries, and support technicians of all kinds, and there was a severe shortage of housing. Dick Dingledein and I moved in with the Biebels.

I had never been to the South; my old high school, DeWitt Clinton, had had about ten thousand students coming to class in three shifts every day. It was totally integrated.

On one occasion, I found myself in Hampton, Virginia, without a car, and I wanted to get back to the Biebels’ house in Phoebus. Mallory Avenue in Phoebus was a trolley car stop, and it was where I wanted to get to. So when the Mallory Avenue trolley car came by in Hampton, I got on board, found a seat that I liked, which was quite a way in the back, and sat down behind a white line painted across the center of the car. The trolley had already started to move when it suddenly came to a stop. The conductor apparently had taken a look in his mirror and noticed me. Without saying anything to me, I saw him motion to a Black man who was seated in front of me, and the man got up and moved to the very back of the car. I had no idea what was going on until I got to Bill Biebel’s house and told him about it. He said, Didn’t you see the white line in the floor of the car about halfway back? Colored people have to sit behind the line, and whites have to sit in front of it. You were the one that should have moved to the front where you belonged, but this is the South, and he had to get out of your way.

The house that Bill and Rita Biebel had rented, and from whom Dingledein and I had rented a room, consisted of two small bedrooms and a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, and a small unheated room off the kitchen. Bill and Rita had a three-year-old daughter who slept with them in one bedroom, and Dick and I shared the other. Our room consisted of a closet, a fifty-four-inch-wide double bed, a dresser with three drawers, and a kerosene heater. Fortunately, Dick and I were both thin and were used to sleeping in single beds at home. Also our work schedule accommodated this sleeping arrangement, for as I was getting up to go to work in the day shift of the flight section, he was getting home from the night shift in the full-scale wind tunnel.

Chapter 2

Langley Field

The Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, as it was officially known, had been established at the end of War World I and had existed at Langley Field during the ’20s and ’30s with a cadre of engineers and their assistants doing basic research on aeronautical problems and equipment.