His Flights of Fancy

David M. Brown was the sort of guy who flew to another state to get dinner.

He built his own planes. As an undergraduate at the College of William & Mary, he pedaled around campus on a unicycle after a summer spent as an acrobat in a Florida circus.

Eventually, Brown’s resume included physician, flight surgeon, test pilot and astronaut. Even before boarding Columbia for his first spaceflight, he was dreaming of the next step: Maybe a spacewalk, he told his friends.

Gifted and disciplined in his pursuit of one dream after the next, the Arlington, Va.-born Navy officer stood out not just for his eclectic successes but also for his humility. A fellow flight surgeon, Air Force Capt. Dwight Holland, was always struck by Brown’s unassuming air.

“There are a lot of smart and bright people, and they let you know it,” said Holland. “He was very intelligent but very humble. He had a quiet demeanor about him. He was like the best of the best in that sense.”

Brown’s aerial passions date to his childhood, when, like many of his fellow astronauts, he idolized the pioneers of outer space. “I was a young boy during the days of the Gemini and Apollo missions, and I always thought that being an astronaut was the coolest thing that you could do,” Brown, 46, said in one preflight interview.

He thought outer space was out of reach, so when he attended William & Mary in Virginia, he studied biology with an eye toward medical school. He threw himself into gymnastics, as well. When word circulated that a circus in Florida was looking for acrobats, Brown signed up. During that summer, he also worked as a stilt-walker and unicyclist.

Brown learned how to fly at an airfield not far from the college. He attended Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk. Brown joined the Navy in 1984 and became a flight surgeon, working in Alaska and on the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in the Pacific. “He talked his way into riding with some of the pilots on the jets,” recalled Cliff Gauthier, Brown’s college gymnastics coach and friend. “Next thing you know, he’s in flight school.”

In 1988, Brown became the only flight surgeon in 10 years chosen for pilot training. Brown was chosen as an astronaut in 1996 and moved to an unusual neighborhood in Friendswood, Texas, a few miles from NASA headquarters.

“Some people dream of living on the ocean or a golf course,” Brown told friends. “My dream is to live on an airstrip, where I can come home and fly.” He bought a house in a subdivision built around a strip from which he could fly to work each day. Brown, a bachelor, was adored in the tight-knit neighborhood, where residents cared for his beloved 14-year-old yellow lab, Duggins, while he was away. Duggins died before the Columbia lifted off, but Brown didn’t know that, said next-door neighbor Mary Lee Kennedy. “We were very concerned about Dave coming home to the house without the dog,” Kennedy said.