[f-AA] Owner Iinterstate Aircraft Co.

[Arecit]

Published 10/24/06 



Aircraft Business Owner Dies While Pursuing His Dream
By Peter Jamison
Valley News Staff Writer
Lebanon -- Bart Miller was the starting quarterback for the Hanover High football team, a college baseball player, the minister's son who married the woman he began dating in high school, a father. He built bridges in Alaska and laid water pipes beneath California's freeways. After many years spent out West, he came home for a labor of love.
Bart Miller loved to fly airplanes. To design and sell them was his next goal. And it was in pursuit of that vision, in the hangar he built to house his fledgling bush-plane manufacturing business, that he died yesterday, shortly after 9 a.m. Police said he was crushed by a heavy piece of machinery.
After the tragedy, friends who grew up with Bart Miller called him “a hero,” “the all-American kid,” and “one of the best guys in the world.” Dick Dodds, who was a year below Bart Miller at Hanover High, said, “If you needed a homerun, he'd hit it. If you needed a touchdown run, he'd do it.”
Bart Miller, 49, rented the property where he built airplanes from the Lebanon Airport. Steve Miller, manager of the airport, said his tenant was in the last stages of gaining Federal Aviation Administration approval for the Arctic Tern, a bush-plane he'd personally designed for short-distance landings and takeoffs, for the kind of runways afforded by wilderness: dirt roads, woodland clearings, gravel bars.
Late yesterday morning, Steve Miller (who is not related to Bart Miller) sat in his second-story office. “If I didn't know the guy, it was shocking enough,” he said, looking out through his window at an overcast sky and wet runways. “But Jesus. I talked to the guy Friday.”
Lebanon Police Chief Jim Alexander said that police investigators had determined Bart Miller's death was an accident. Beyond saying that Bart Miller was killed by a piece of machinery, Alexander would not further describe the circumstances surrounding the death, except to say that a forklift was involved.
Alexander said that since police had all but ruled out that a crime was committed, further investigation of the matter would probably be turned over to the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Rosemarie Ohar, area director for OSHA in Concord, would only say that investigators were looking into a death at Bart Miller's company -- called Interstate Aircraft Co. -- and that the investigation would not be completed for days or perhaps weeks.
Bart Miller's wife, Karen Miller, declined to comment yesterday. But close friends sketched a portrait of a man who was always at work or at play, with family or with friends, solving problems, chasing dreams.
“On the weekend, he'd go rebuild the axle unit of his '63 Range Rover,” said Bill Mitchell, a Hanover resident who grew up with Bart Miller. “Oh, he was something else.”
After graduating from Williams College, friends said, Bart Miller traveled to Alaska with buddies. He fell in love with the land, and after an interlude earning a graduate degree at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, he went back to Alaska. Friends said he was employed there with Kiewit, the civil-engineering firm, and that it was there he learned to fly. Later he worked in California and Maryland. He climbed the corporate ladder but grew restless, eventually deciding to get back into “the field.”
So he breathed new life into Interstate Aircraft, an Alaska-based company that had ceased production of its single-engine Arctic Tern bush-planes. He moved the company to the heart of the Upper Valley in the late 1990s, renting space at the Lebanon Airport. He set to work with his hands, refining the Arctic Tern's design and seeking FAA certification. He moved his family, a wife and two sons, to Norwich.
“He wasn't going to be turned into a desk guy again,” Mitchell said.
The FAA approval process ground on. Bart Miller continued to refine his aircraft, focusing on small efficiencies, tweaking design imperfections almost invisible to the naked eye. 
“He'd walk you through and show you every detail, and you'd just smile,” said Cameron Eldred, who attended both high school and college with Bart Miller. “It was so brilliant. It is so brilliant.”
Bart Miller's father was an Episcopalian minister in Norwich. His own sons, in 8th and 9th grade, play hockey on local teams and babysit for other families in the neighborhood. “They raised two great kids,” neighbor Lisa Christie said of the Millers.
Eldred said that his friend's life was bound together by a thread of enthusiasm drawn through one event after the next. “That engineering thing and that whole Alaska thing was definitely the pursuit of a passion,” Eldred said. “And the development of Interstate Aircraft, the Arctic Tern, was a continuation of that.”
What will become of that energy is unknown. Bart Miller was the mastermind behind the Arctic Tern's renaissance. Steve Miller, the airport manager, said Bart Miller had only a couple of employees.
“We're all devastated to lose this friend, but the blessing of knowing him has left us better people,” Bill Mitchell said.
Yet Bart Miller's dream of flight -- now officially the last dream among his many -- has an uncertain fate.
“It just wasn't right,” Eldred said. “It's a terrible tragedy.”
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