Face to Face
Midnight Runner
A researcher by day, Clifford Steer flew bank checks and military explosives around the country by night.
By Carmen Peota
Clifford Steer, M.D., knows what it’s like to burn a candle at both ends. While doing a fellowship in hepatology at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the late 1970s and 1980s, Steer moonlighted two to three nights a week. But he wasn’t working in hospital ERs or urgent care centers. He was flying cargo planes up and down the East Coast.
Steer, now a professor of medicine, genetics, and cell biology at the University of Minnesota, would take off from Baltimore Washington International Airport at 11 p.m., fly most of the night, come home and sleep a couple of hours, and then get up and go to work at the NIH. Most often, he was hauling canceled bank checks during those late-night flights.
Before electronic fund transfers, banks relied on pilots, many of whom were trying to log hours in the cockpit, to return millions of cashed checks to them. “It’s a multibillion dollar business that people don’t even know exists,” Steer says. “It was Pony Express flying in the sense that you had to be at a certain airport at a certain time. No matter what the weather was, you flew. No matter what the condition of the airplane was, you flew.”
For Steer, it wasn’t the business, the chance to accumulate flying hours, or even the extra money that compelled him to forfeit so much sleep and risk his life in inclement weather. He simply wanted to fly. “Whether they paid me or didn’t pay me made no difference,” he says. “They gave me the opportunity to fly, and I took it.”
It was dangerous work. Steer recalls flying through the edge of a hurricane and multiple thunderstorms. One time, after coming through a “horrific” storm, he landed and discovered he had only a gallon of gasoline left in the tank. “It was beyond white knuckles,” he says.
Yet Steer loved it. He liked the notion that he was doing something different from the norm, and he liked that he was pushing himself. “It was a very exciting thing,” he says.
At First, Fear
Only a few years earlier, flying planes was not even on Steer’s radar. He was consumed by his medical training; he ran for exercise (he did the very first New York Marathon) and he was a sports car enthusiast (he once owned two Jaguar XKEs).
His career as a pilot might never have gotten off the ground had he not met a medical student during his residency at the University of Minnesota who asked him if he’d ever been up in a small airplane. Steer admitted he hadn’t, and the student invited him to go flying. Steer recalls going to the South St. Paul airport and getting into a two-seater Tomahawk. He also recalls the feelings he had as they flew—and they weren’t positive. “The thing I remember most about the flight was how scared I was because I had no control over my destiny,” he says. “There I was at 2,000 feet. He was flying, and if something happened to him, I would not be able to handle the situation.”
It was anything but love at first flight. In fact, Steer was so bothered by the experience that he decided he needed to do something about it. Rather than avoid small planes altogether, he decided to take flying lessons. His idea was to learn just enough to ensure that he wouldn’t feel so apprehensive in a small airplane ever again. Two lessons turned into more, and “then I got bitten by the bug,” he says. Learning a little about piloting was not enough. He wanted to learn everything about it.
So when Steer moved east for the NIH fellowship in 1976, he was on the lookout for any way to pursue his newfound passion. In addition to flying bank checks during the week, he worked as a flight instructor on the weekends and continued his own training, earning certificate after certificate. “I have everything there is that even the most senior Delta Airlines pilot would have, including the ATP [Airline Transport Pilot] certificate, the Ph.D. of flying.” He sold his sports cars and bought his first plane, a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron 58 in the early 1980s.
Then Addiction
At one point, Steer contemplated leaving medicine to take a job flying corporate jets. He decided not to, in part because he had invested so much time and effort into becoming a doctor and in part because he realized that a career as a professional pilot was a tenuous one. “It just takes a kitten to scratch your cornea, and you can’t fly. What do you have then?” he says.
Steer readily admits flying had become an addiction. “If you don’t have your fix, it becomes uncomfortable.” So until he was 40 years old, he doctored and researched by day and flew by night. But in the late 1980s, both his career and personal life took a turn. Steer got married, and he and his wife Pat, a nurse, decided to move back to Minnesota to be closer to family. Steer was offered a professorship in the department of medicine at the university.
Back in Minnesota, Steer gave flying lessons. But he soon missed the kind of flying he had done out East. With Pat’s blessing, he started hunting for a flying job, again seeking one that wouldn’t interfere with his work at the university.
He eventually saw an ad in the newspaper that piqued his curiosity. It read, “Wanted: experienced pilots.” Steer called the number and applied. It turned out that the ad was for Arrowhead Airways, one of only two private companies in the United States that flew hazardous cargo for the Department of Defense. Steer was offered a job on the spot, provided he could pass a federal security clearance.
Once again, Steer found himself moonlighting, this time carrying class A explosives to military bases around the country. “We flew into airports that don’t exist,” he says. “We were met by military personnel with loaded machine guns. We always had to park the planes at the farthest end of the airport because of what we were carrying. And we were always met by the fire department because we were flying explosives.”
Steer had his closest brush with death on one of those trips. It was close to midnight in late November, and he was in a twin-engine plane with the president of the company, who was asleep in the back. They were flying at an altitude lower than what Steer would have liked in order to avoid strong winds when they encountered a severe ice storm. First one engine and then the other lost power. The air intakes had iced up. “I was at 4,000 feet 60 miles from land over Lake Michigan. I knew I was going to die,” he says. His co-pilot woke up and while Steer glided the plane, he worked to activate the alternative air intakes. They eventually were able to restart one engine and climb high enough to get out of the storm. But they had been a mere 2,000 feet above Lake Michigan.
Family Guy
Although that experience didn’t end his flying career, it prompted a change in his thinking. “All I could think of was how upset Pat was going to be. We were newlyweds.” That concern intensified with the births of his three children. (He notes that the money he once spent on airplanes now goes for college tuition.)
Steer’s night flying ended when Arrowhead Airways was sold and moved to Florida in 1994. To get his flying “fix” now, he gives lessons for free. Interestingly, those who know him well say Steer is anything but a dare-devil or risk-taker. Pat Steer says that “exacting” and “safety-conscious” are better descriptors—she says her husband is the type of guy who always drives at or under the speed limit. As she sees it, Steer likes flying because it’s a mental and technical challenge. She says he’s on a constant quest for knowledge, which is perhaps not surprising, given his academic career.
Pat Steer says her husband’s most remarkable quality is his ability to readily shift gears. “He easily comes in and out of what he’s doing. He has the ability to change focus and be right with you.” That clearly served him well as he juggled two careers successfully for so many years.
A friend and former colleague at the University of Minnesota Medical School, with whom Steer once co-owned an airplane, says he doesn’t think Steer’s obsession with flying is particularly unique. “I think most pilots are fairly passionate about their flying,” says Cary Mariash, M.D., now medical director of Methodist Research Institute at Indiana University Health. Mariash says that because it takes dedication and persistence to get and maintain a pilot certificate. “You probably end up weeding out those who are not that interested.”
A Grounding Experience
Both Mariash and Steer say a big part of the appeal of piloting a plane is that it requires their full concentration, allowing them to leave behind their medical careers. As Steer puts it: “When you’re flying the airplane, your focus is on flying the airplane.”
Steer says flying has provided him a window on a world he’d otherwise wouldn’t have known. He speaks fondly of the other pilots he’s met. Relationships with those aviators may be part of what has kept Steer grounded as he climbed the ladder of academic medicine, reaching full professorship early in his career. “When you’re among pilots, you’re a pilot,” he says. “They don’t care whether you’re an MD or a Nobel Prize winner or anything like that.” MM
Carmen Peota is managing editor of Minnesota Medicine.