In Memory Of

Young pilot lived to fly

Family mourns Navy officer from Whitefish Bay

By Joanne Weintraub, staff writer for The Journal (Milwaukee, WI)

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Whitefish Bay — Even on the day after his eldest son died in an airplane crash, Gerford Carver couldn’t help smiling a little when he remembered his sons zest for flying.

"He came home one day — he was a sophomore in high school — and gave me a sales pitch,” Carver recalled Tuesday, sitting on the porch of the Whitefish Bay home where his son John grew up. He wanted a plane of his own to learn to fly on.”

The pitch was so eager — and Gerford Carver his own unfilled dreams of line were still so vivid — that the boys father helped him to buy, along with some friends, a little Cessna two-seater. Having his own plane to practice on even made it possible for young John Robert Carver to win his pilots license before he earned his drivers license.

Flying became John Carver's hobby, then his passion, then his career. It also was the way he met his death.

The 31-year-old Navy Lieutenant died Monday in a mid-air collision over England while on a NATO exercise. Also killed was the pilot of the other plane, flight Lieutenant David Sunderland of Britain's Royal Air Force.

Both men were flying RAF Harrier jets, sophisticated fighter planes that can"jump"straight into a vertical takeoff." The cause of the crash has not been determined.

Carver died alone, but he spent most of his life surrounded by the sort of large and loving family that people naturally for referred to as the "Carver clan.” Twenty-four hours after receiving word of his death, most of the clan — now a far flung collection of grown-up siblings — already had gathered at Gerford and Eleanor Carver’s home at 880 E. Birch St.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Beth Carver Kramer, Sarah Carver Worrall, and brothers Jim and Bill sat with their father on his sunny porch as their mother attended to affairs in the house. Kramer had just driven from her home in Cincinnati, and the others have flown in from their homes in Colorado. A third sister, Meg Halley, lives in Topeka Kansas.

John Carver’s wife of one year, Charmaine, plans to fly home with her husband's body later in the week. The couple had been living in Gutersloh, West Germany, where the Navy pilot was on exchange posting with the RAF.

The Carver clan was a nearly perfect stair-step family, with only seven years separating John from Sarah, the youngest. The two oldest boys were so tight, Kramer recalled, that her friends at Whitefish Bay high school "thought of them as one unit— Jim-and-John.”

Flying however, was John's love alone. Gerford Carver had been an amateur aircraft spotter as a boy during World War II, and he passed on his enthusiasm to his oldest child.

John started out with glider lessons as an Explorer Scout, then progressed to the Cessna. He worked after classes at high school, and later at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, to help pay for the plane and the lessons.

After graduating from UWM in 1979, Carver enlisted as a naval officer candidate. During flight training he was ranked in the top 1% of his class, his family noted probably.

But he never fit the cocky, revved-up image of fighter pilots in such movies as "Top Gun" and "The Right Stuff,” his sisters and brothers said.

“Macho? That wasn't John at all," said Jim Carver. “‘Competent’ is the word.”

Kramer added that for all the high tech dazzle of the fighter planes John was interested with, he still loved to go up in a glider.

“He said he'd did give up flying anything before he'd give a flying that,” she remembered.

In the midst of the Carvers disbelief and sadness there was some small consolation in the fact that the clan had been together one last time before John's death. Just two weeks ago, they all converged – including John, who flew home on a weekend pass — for Bill's wedding. John Carver had just run his first marathon, in Berlin, and was as elated as he was foot sore, his family said.

And shortly before the wedding, the elder Carver's had flown to West Germany for an extended visit. Because Gerford Carver, 58, had recently retired from his job as an engineer with A.O. Smith Corp., the Carver's were able to spend a good long month with their son.

“Fortunately,” John Carver's father side with a sigh. “Fortunately.”