Dean Davis was born on May 11, 1932 in Union City, Tennessee. While still in high school, he joined the US Navy Ready Reserve unit VF-791 at Millington NAS, Memphis, Tennessee in 1951. He became an aviation ordnance man and later served as a combat air crewman in VP-791. In 1955, he began working as an assistance design engineer at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation in St. Louis, Missouri, working on the F-101B design project. Through the years Dean performed laboratory test and flight support for several projects. In 1964 he received his Commercial pilot rating in Navion N-8798H at the St. Charles, Missouri airport. In 1965 he received his Instrument Pilot rating in a Piper PA-24 Comanche N-7981P at the Spartan School of Aeronautics and his Multi-Engine rating in a Piper Aztec PA-23 N-4729P at the Santa Barbra, California airport.
Dean graduated from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri in June of 1970 with a B.S. in Electrical engineering. In December of 1973 Dean left McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and went to work for Honeywell in Clearwater, Florida as a test conductor on the Guidance, Control and Sequencing Computer for the NASA Viking program. When the Viking Lander landed on Mars the GCSC carried a gold plate with the Honeywell contributor’s names on it, Dean’s name was on this plate.
In June of 1977 Dean went to work for Piper Aircraft Corporation in Lakeland, Florida. There he worked on building the PA-31 Navajo and did advance design for the PA-42 Cheyenne III. In September of 1981 Dean was hired as project Manager at Reflectone, INC in Tampa, Florida to develop an Engineering Change Proposal to upgrade their A-10 Operational Flight trainer to include the aircraft’s Inertial Navigation System. Reflectone was awarded the contract and he became the A-10 Program Manager and completed delivery of all 14 simulators to the Air Force and closed out that contract. He then became Program Manager for the Navy E-6A proposal and when they were awarded the contract, he managed the design, build, delivery and then the selloff of the two simulators in December 1988.
Dean moved to the FAA Engineering Field Office at NASA Langley in October of 1989 and began Phase 1 of the Feasibility Study for the Cockpit Display of Traffic Information. He completed Phase 1 in April of 1991. He received a Certificate of Appreciation from Thomas P. Messler the FAA Director of Research and Development Service and Malcolm A. Burgess the Manager, FAA Engineering Field Office, Langley.
In December 2004 Dean was presented with The Wright Brothers “Master Pilot” Award at a ceremony at the FAA Media Center in Lakeland, Florida. He had accumulated 3,987 PIC hours of accident-free flying and had flown 51 different types of aircraft from the Piper J-3 Cub to the Douglas DC-3.