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Riding with Dan Brown, a lot of his stories start, “I saved a guy one night … ” He's not boasting; it's a matter of pragmatism in his industry to say it like it is. His team is called to save about 100 lives across Utah each week.
Dan is a Life Flight pilot, and preserving lives is his job. From overeager day hikers to drunk all-terrain vehicle drivers, he daily combs the mountains and canyons west of Utah Valley in search of the lost and brings them back to Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo for help. But today, as he expects the arrival of his tenth grandchild, it's impossible to recount all the lives that have changed because of his work without addressing one in particular: his own. It was barrelling through the air in a helicopter in 1985 that he met a young flight nurse named Jean -- a cute girl who would eventually become his wife. "It's a part of us," he said, leaning against the fuselage of a Bell 407 chopper. "It's a piece of us."
Hotshot pilot Dan's flying career began in the military. During tours in Vietnam in '69 and '72, he flew scout missions and gunships. In '79 he returned to Utah, where he attended BYU. He took a job with Rocky Mountain Helicopters scouting potential oil reserves. For a couple years in the early '80s, he was Robert Redford's personal pilot during filming of "The Natural." His job as a pilot gave him his first brush with the medical aviation world -- but he was in the wrong helicopter. "I crashed," he said. "Life Flight picked me up." In 1983, because of connections in the area, he was offered a job in the state's only air ambulance service at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake. That's where he noticed a couple of nurses wandering down the hall one day. "I said to the paramedic, 'Hey, those are the kinds of girls we ought to have on the flight crew,' " he said.
Inauspicious beginnings Little did Dan know one of the women was on a flight crew. Jean, an ICU nurse at the time, had been working on fixed-wing aircraft running longer distances and often carrying infants who needed more intensive equipment in-air. The pair worked at the same facility for two years as total strangers -- until the day Jean switched to working rotor-wing craft. "I took her on her very first flight to Sundance," Dan remembered. They were called to pick up an injured girl. Though there would be fireworks later, the first flight together was too frantic for either of them to test the chemistry, Jean said. "It just sort of slowly developed over time," she said. Working 12-hour shifts, members of the flight crew quickly learn to regard each other as family, Jean said. They hiked together, golfed together, threw parties together -- but when Dan invited her to ski with him on a day off, the rest of the crew had a hunch something more was developing. "Most of the team knew about it, but not the administration," Jean said.
Free to fly It wasn't until Dan took a job with a news crew in Salt Lake that the two could enjoy their affection openly. Though they no longer worked together, the change was actually positive, because it afforded them more free time with each other, Jean said. "It was a year later when we finally got married," she said. Over the following 20 years, a series of happy misadventures brought the two to the same flight in different helicopters. Once, a small plane had crashed into Promontory Point. Jean's crew responded first, only to find that one of the men in the plane hadn't yet contacted his wife because he had no means of communication. Dan swooped in and dropped his cell phone to his wife. Other times, there was less opportunity for interaction. "I'd run over and give him a kiss and run back," Jean said.
Not grounded yet Dan returned to Life Flight in 2004, bringing both his family and professional lives full-circle. "It was like coming home," he said. Company rules prevent the Browns from sharing a helicopter, but that's how they prefer it anyway. Their three grown daughters worry profusely these days any time both their parents end up on the same flight. "It works out good," Jean said. So they try to work the same shifts on different aircraft, which gets them by most the time. Other times, a quick passing in the hall has to suffice. With Dan looking at retirement a few years away, he's investing more in his hobbies, like restoring an old '68 Mustang Fastback for auto shows around the valley. Jean is taking oil painting classes and maintains an intense love for pottery. But when the day comes, there will be no replacing the helicopter rides, they said. "He might shed a tear," Jean said. "It's gonna be a bunch of tears," Dan added. • Ace Stryker can be reached at 344-2556 or
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