More detail on this person: Bill Nemitz: 'This
is how Dad would have wanted to die'
PORTLAND - Tucked into a corner of Tom
Casagrande's basement, surrounded by models and
photographs of the scores of airplanes he adored,
the helmets he wore, the technical manuals he
memorized, even the ejection seat from an OV-1
Mohawk in which he once sat, is a simple sign.
click image to enlarge
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crash
"I Love Airplane Noise," it says.
Talk about an understatement. From the moment
he first got into a cockpit as a middle schooler
in Pennsylvania until his tragic death in
Saturday's crash of an Aerostar Yak-52 two-seater
just outside the Portland International Jetport,
Tom Casagrande, 66, didn't just love airplane
noise.
He lived for it.
"From the smell to the feel to the conversation,
this was his comfort zone," said Steve Casagrande,
one of Tom's five children. "These aren't just
pictures of airplanes he liked. This is stuff he
flew."
It will be months before investigators issue their
final report on why the former Romanian Air Force
plane, piloted by owner Mark Haskell of Brunswick
with Casagrande in the rear cockpit, failed to
gain altitude on takeoff and banked sharply back
toward the airport runway before crashing onto
Western Avenue in South Portland.
But as they sat in their father's one-man aviation
museum Monday afternoon, sons Steve, 37, and
Matt, 23, and daughter Tracy Clancy, 39, already
were certain of two things:
First, the crash must have been rooted in
mechanical malfunction, not pilot (or co-pilot)
error.
And second, the fact that no one on the ground was
injured wasn't just a matter of chance.
"He would have been calm, cool and collected,"
said Matt, a newly commissioned ensign in the
Navy who soon will begin training to become a
military pilot -- just like his father once was.
"He would have been doing everything he could to
take control of the situation,"
Chances are, you never heard of Tom Casagrande
before his name flashed on news bulletins
throughout New England over the weekend. He was,
after all, a guy who managed to climb to the
highest levels of aviation while keeping his many
accomplishments, as Tracy so aptly put it, "below
the radar."
But make no mistake about it. In aviation circles,
Tom Casagrande was an icon.
All told, he spent 13,000 hours in the air.
He was proficient at the controls of not a dozen,
not 50, not 75 different aircraft, but an
ear-popping 190.
And in his two tours flying everything from rescue
helicopters to fixed-wing reconnaissance planes in
the Vietnam War, he earned no fewer than 66
medals -- something not even his children knew
before they began compiling material for his
obituary Monday morning.
The son of a World War II Army paratrooper who
landed at Normandy on D-Day, Tom got the flying
bug when he was growing up in Hazleton, Pa., and
Uncle Carl took him up one day to inspect a row of
power lines.
The next thing his elders knew, Tom was taking the
single-engine Piper Vagabond, co-owned by his
father and uncle, up by himself. Without a
license. And without permission.
"The kids at his middle school didn't believe him
when he told them he could fly," Steve said with a
chuckle. "So he'd take it up, fly over the school,
fly back, park it and then blame (the drop in the
fuel gauge) on his Uncle Carl."
At 15, while his peers were busy learning to drive
cars, Tom already had his pilot's license.
By 21, 13 days after he enlisted in the Army and
completed flight school, he was on his way to fly
choppers in Vietnam.
And by 27, after finishing his second tour, he'd
been shot down three times and come into contact
with enough of the defoliant Agent Orange to be
100 percent disabled later in life, with numbness
in his legs, diabetes and problems with his
eyes.
"But he never blamed his country -- ever," said
Steve.
Oh? Then whom did he blame?
"Nobody," he replied. "He volunteered."
Tom, you see, never stopped loving his country and
its military, both of which he proudly called "the
best in the world."
Even after leaving the Army in 1970, he worked for
20 years as a civilian test pilot for the
Department of Defense. One day, he'd be at the
controls of an Apache helicopter, devising
air-combat tactics; the next, he'd be flying a
captured Soviet MiG fighter, looking for the flaws
in his own strategies.
His five kids by two marriages came to know his
passion early.
"We were 6 weeks old when he'd first take us up,"
said Tracy.
Ditto for his grandchildren. Tracy's son Aiden,
10, has an aviation museum of his own in the works
in his bedroom back in Birmingham, Ala.
If all had gone according to plan, he'd have taken
his first open-cockpit biplane flight with his
grandfather during his family's previously
scheduled trip to Maine this week.
"Back when Aiden was only 5, Dad wouldn't send
him Dr. Seuss books," Tracy said. "He'd send 'The
Basics of Flying.' It was hysterical."
It also worked. Aiden had just turned 8 on the day
he went up with Grandpa and, just like that,
suddenly found himself banking left, then right,
then left
"I got to handle the controls. It was amazing," he
said, still struggling to comprehend the fact that
his "hero" is gone.
They all are struggling. But even as they grieve,
Tom's family takes comfort in their certainty that
he (and, they stress, his friend and companion
Haskell), knew exactly what he was doing right up
until the end. And that he was doing what he
loved.
Matt, who helped buckle his father in on Saturday
and then watched as he and Haskell took off on
what was a recertification flight for Haskell,
said his father's skill as a pilot was equaled
only by his safety consciousness.
In any tight spot, Matt said, "there's nobody else
you'd want more to be with."
And while there probably was nothing the two men
could have done to avoid crashing -- investigators
said Monday that the plane's propeller was no
longer rotating when the plane hit the ground --
Tom's family and friends find some comfort knowing
that he was pursuing his passion to the end.
"This is how Dad would have wanted to die," said
Tracy. "It's what he found peace in."
When Steve was about 7, he had a gerbil named
Evel KaGerbel. One day, Steve came home from
school to find his somber-faced father waiting by
the door.
"Your gerbil died," Tom gently told his son.
Steve was devastated. Tom, good father that he
was, tried his best to cushion the blow.
"I'm sure he's in heaven," Tom told him.
"But where's heaven?" asked Steve.
"Come with me," said Tom.
They drove out to the airfield and climbed into "a
little tail-dragger," recalled Steve. Up, up, up
they went, as they so often did, far above life as
most of us know it.
Finally leveling off, Tom slowed the plane, leaned
over and opened Steve's window.
"Stick your hand out there," he said.
Steve held his hand out and felt the cool air
rushing by.
"Feel that?" asked Tom.
The boy nodded at his father. Tom smiled back at
his son.
"That's heaven," he said.
Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at
791-6323 or at: bnemitz@mainetoday.com
This information was last updated 05/18/2016
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Date posted on this site: 03/11/2023
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