An Impulsive Trip--on USAir Flight 427 : Tragedy: When Southland engineer’s meeting ended early, he hopped a plane to surprise his parents for his 40th birthday. Relatives and colleagues recall plane crash victim as quiet, dedicated and dynamic.

Since he moved west to Cypress, research engineer David D. Garber liked to surprise his parents on special occasions, popping up unexpectedly on their doorstep in North Canton, Ohio.

So on Thursday when a conference in Chicago ended early, Garber hopped on USAir Flight 427 to Pittsburgh, an hour’s drive from his hometown. He was turning 40 on Friday and wanted to spend it with family.

But on the morning of Garber’s birthday, his mother, Martha, got a telephone call from USAir. Her son had died, along with 131 others, on a flight she never knew he was taking.

“They didn’t even know he was coming,” said Bob Hooper, Garber’s college classmate from Ohio, as he stood outside Garber’s Cypress home Saturday. “They didn’t know until the airline called them Friday morning.”

On a wall outside Garber’s home, someone had placed a vase of carnations. Inside, his parents, his former girlfriend and Hooper tried to come to terms with the fate that had snatched the quiet, gentle Northrop Grumman engineer, a bachelor whose projects were often so classified that even his closest friends had no idea what he was working on or where.

“He’s with me every Saturday night having a barbecue,” said Hilda McDonald, Garber’s friend since 1977. “Tonight I keep thinking he might show up with his porterhouse and wine.”

Strangely, Garber’s parents and friends had thrown him an early 40th birthday celebration, complete with gag gifts, in Ohio last month.

And McDonald had tossed Garber an early surprise birthday barbecue in Cypress last Saturday, luring him over by telling him it was a housewarming party.

“Talk about making assumptions,” Hooper said, shaking his head over the pre-birthday celebrations. “He was five hours from turning 40 when he died.”

Hooper, who got his master’s degree in statistics with Garber at the University of Akron, had made a rare visit to Garber last week while he was in California on business. The pair had driven to Tijuana and Hooper had handed over a list of songs Garber had demanded back in February: the 10 albums Hooper would take with him when he died.

“He was so intent on finding it out. I don’t know why. I finally finished it the day before I left here last week,” Hooper said. “It’s eerie. I’m just glad I saw him.”

Garber’s list had included: Vivaldi, Mozart and the Beatles’ “Abbey Road.” Garber, who had a doctorate in electrical engineering from USC, had worked as an engineer at Northrop Grumman since 1981. For the past half a dozen years he worked at the Electronics System Division in Hawthorne, specializing in programming computers to recognize and target images, even from the most blurry film or video. Friends say he had even done some work on cockpit instrumentation.

Monday, he and a group of co-workers flew to Chicago for a conference at the Northrop Grumman site in Rolling Meadows, a suburb of Chicago. The meeting finished sooner than expected Wednesday, so Garber told co-workers he was going to take an earlier flight to Pittsburgh the next day.

“Everybody else was coming back to California,” a co-worker said. “Dave had intended to take two days of vacation Thursday and Friday. . . . The last time the (other Northrop workers) saw him was on Wednesday night. He apparently took a flight he hadn’t intended on taking.”

Garber’s resume tells of a man who moved from one high-powered, highly classified project to another. At the age of 24, he served as the principal investigator on image restorations for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations. A year later he was a consultant to Project Air Force for the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, devising battle management strategies and cruise missile simulations. In 1985, after receiving his doctorate, he taught computer architecture at USC.

But no matter how busy he got, Garber always made time for his city, serving on Cypress’ voluntary Traffic Commission since 1987. In his application letter in 1986, Garber said he was “concerned about development in the city, especially as it relates to traffic flow,” and offered his technical expertise and “plain common sense” to help.

Garber was chairman of the commission from 1991 to 1993. In 1992, he recommended placing controversial parking regulations on the ballot, measures that would have restricted large vehicles and nighttime parking. He spoke with friends about running for City Council.

“He’s just a wonderful man, very quiet, very dedicated,” said Linda Keenan, who now heads the Traffic Commission. “He threw his whole heart into every meeting.”

Cypress Mayor Cecilia Age has been making plans to dedicate next Monday night’s City Council meeting to Garber.

“I was surprised when I first saw him on the Traffic Commission,” Age said. “He was younger and he was talented and he was very smart.”

But Age said Garber quickly became the spokesman for the commission. “The guy had a lot going for him. He was very dynamic.”

On Saturday, McDonald wept as she entered Garber’s house with his parents.

She had met Garber in 1977, when she was administrator of the USC image-processing institute and he was a research assistant. Although she has married three times since, she said, Garber had been the one constant and the only father figure her 16-year-old daughter had ever known.

“He never wanted to tell me his itinerary. I told him I would never know if he got there or not,” McDonald said. “He said, ‘Oh babe, when I drop, you’ll just know.’ ”

Times staff writer Mark I. Pinsky contributed to this report.