He taught me to fly. RIP Dave.
Edit: upon further reflection over my morning coffee, I'm reminded of George Patton's statement that "it is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived." Those of us who went through IFS with Dave know that it was a somewhat unique experience compared to what our compatriots were going through at the same time. Maybe not as hectic or technically challenging as what we've done since, but as the proverbial "young skull full of cottage cheese," it was more than enough for this young Ensign. The IFS program was 60 days long at that point; most of his studs flew through the program. I finished in 2 weeks. It was the "open mouth, insert firehose" method of learning how to fly, and it worked. I'd like to encourage anyone who is a Dave Miles IFS alum to share any funny or memorable stories they had from training with the man. God knows you're here and you remember too.
My partner went to Georgia Tech. Whenever Dave would be illustrating some concept in the brief, he'd get to some point where he'd say, "now a guy from Penn State might say X, and a guy who went to Georgia Tech might tell you Y, but really the answer is Z . . ."
I'm not surprised at the article saying the mishap occurred at 4:30am. Dave always had us there early, like 0530 early. Big Navy wouldn't pay for BOQ rooms since Eglin was "local area." So it was get up at 03-something, drive from the P-cola BOQ to my partner's apartment, then carpool to Eglin, brief, fly both our events, debrief, go home, study, and be in bed at 1900 to repeat the cycle. I got ahead of my partner towards the end and got a BOQ room on my own dime for the cross-country solo.
The first time I tried to do a power-off stall, I departed the freaking Cessna. I can still remember being 40 degrees nose down with Choctawatchee Bay filling up my windscreen. Col. Miles just talked me through the UA recovery and off we went.
My partner was flying on a day we were sure to get canxed for weather. Nope! Oops. Clouds roll in. Dave pulls the FL low plates out of his helmet bag and starts tuning NAVAIDs. He starts telling my partner ok, now do this, now fly here, turn here, keep these needles centered. 15 hours total time, and he's flying the ILS to a full stop!
My technique in the flare could closely be approximated using a horny monkey and a football. That was my major hangup early on. The day Dave finally got the lightbulb to come on, I can't think of how many landings we did. Cloud layer going in and out at pattern altitude, and we explored every variation of the Eglin traffic pattern. Left pattern, right pattern, switch runways, back to the first . . .
I think that was the day before he signed my logbook, hopped out, gave the door a smack and walked away.
You only get to do that once per life.
Thanks, Dave.
