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6/18/2006
In Honor of an Engineer, My Friend Mike Dornheim

A huddle of men and women before dawn in the scrubby desert hills outside Los Angeles.  Edwards Air Force nearby. We wait. We talk quietly. Suddenly, fiery glory, streaking right over our heads. We had come for this, but we gasp anyway. It is the SR-71 Blackbird, stealth reconnaissance plane, the beautiful sleek secret ideal of every aerospace-crazed Southern California boy and girl no matter how old.

The huge plane streaked off toward Washington, D.C., where the pilots would park it for the last time at Dulles Airport. Once top secret, it would rest there for good, it was said, out in the open for every eye to see.

"They didn't really need to turn the afterburners on," said Mike Dornheim, organizer of our little group's homage to the great plane.

My friend Mike knew just about everything there was to know about planes, secret or not, and he was friends with the pilots and engineers in that tight community of people making history in the floating island of Southern California's aerospace industry. He worked as a senior editor for Aviation Week, an edgy authoritative journal where the writers were pilots who could fly the planes they wrote about and often did, reporting on the experience the way a movie critic reviews a movie. He was an insider, and that's how he knew when the SR-71 would fly for the last time and where we could see it taking off.

Mike had been an engineer for Boeing up in Seattle, and moved easily into journalism, winning numerous awards. His industry contacts were unparalleled -- he knew the language and he was one of them. He had an innocent blue-eyed openness about him, combined with a pleasant cynicism, that made him a lot of friends. I was working for a little paper in the South Bay aerospace complex, writing about military satellites and aircraft and the Air Force war strategy think tanks like RAND and the Aerospace Corp. Mike introduced me to Lockheed's Ben Rich, father of stealth, and to many other bright, funny, terribly competent engineers whose names you wouldn't know.

He was so humble that I knew him for more than 15 years without ever learning that he had gone to Stanford on a math scholarship at 16 and had his M.S. in engineering at 21. I only learned of this accomplishment yesterday and in the most terrible way. Mike died in a car crash at age 51 on June 3. I found out yesterday, and I've been thinking a lot about Mike and what he was like.

He had dinner with a couple he had known for years, Tom and Jan Kaminski, at the beautiful old Saddle Peak Lodge, up in the Santa Monica Mountains. "He was in great spirits," said Tom. "We shared a bottle of wine. He had venison."

Mike told Tom and Jan that the road he took driving up to the inn was boring, and he would take a more interesting road on the way down. Tom didn't hear from him that week, but it wasn't uncommon for them to let several days go by without seeing each other. Nor did Mike's colleagues at Aviation Week notice his absence. Mike often worked on his own and didn't always come into the office. 

It wasn't until Friday that Mike didn't show up for an event and another old friend became concerned. She filed a missing persons report. The police said they would keep an eye out for his license plate. That didn't satisfy his friends. Mike was a pilot himself, and had many pilot friends. They flew in from all points and began a search in the hills, without results. Finally, one of them called on friends in the county search and rescue team. They found Mike's Honda in the bottom of a ravine two miles from the restaurant, on its roof, with Mike inside.

Mike was an expert on risk, but I am not telling this story to make a point about trading. He was a true friend, the sort of friend who keeps track of you through the years. He once took my mother flying -- she had earned her pilot's wings as a young woman and still was crazy about it. It meant so much to her. Two weeks before he died, out of the blue, he sent me a birthday card. Nobody remembers my birthday any more, except for my dear Aunt Louise, who is in her '80s and used to make me clothes. Mike and I exchanged news. I told him about Aubrey Darwin, born to Victor and me on May 3. He said he still lived in the same rambling wood frame house in Los Angeles, with a garage full of classic racecars, now accompanied by two motorcycles. He said he had ingrained a little lecture I gave years ago him about the phrasing of a certain passage in a Beethoven sonata he played. He was the kind of friend who remembers things, who makes you feel important. 

It has probably been 10 years since I last saw him, but his death hurts in a way that years don't muffle.