Shortly after David Griffith, M.D., graduated from UT Southwestern Medical School, he hung up his white coat for a flight suit, almost on a whim.

The year was 1985 and the high-flying box office hit Top Gun was being filmed two hours south of what would be his first duty assignment in Victorville, California. Hollywood had trained its sights on the heady world of military aviation when a friend of Dr. Griffith’s, fellow UTSW alum Steve Fonken, M.D. (Medicine ’84), began pursuing his passion to become a flight surgeon. Preferring not to join the military alone, he invited Dr. Griffith to a meeting with an Air Force recruiter.

Dr. Griffith agreed to be his friend’s “wingman” strictly for moral support. Little did he know he would soon be signing up for the military himself, and that his experience would later have a wide application to the business world and a career in medicine.

“I told the recruiter, ‘Hey, I’m just here to support my buddy,’ but the recruiter was very convincing, as they usually are,” Dr. Griffith recalled. “I went home afterward and thought to myself, ‘It’s only a three-year commitment, my dad was career Army, maybe I’ll try it out, but only one condition: I have to fly jets.’”

Dr. Griffth’s military career started at the rank of captain as a flight surgeon in an F-4 Phantom squadron, and then later flying F-15 Eagles in the back seat. He also accrued time in the A-10 Warthog and Bell UH-1 Iroquois “Huey” helicopter. He saw a variety of assignments over 20 years, including eight years in the Air Force Reserves.

During his time at George Air Force Base in Southern California, he accrued over 200 hours in the F-4, while developing the base’s Healthy Heart Program, which offered risk-factor screening and health education for military personnel. He was also the lead flight surgeon for many high-profile Air Force accident investigations, including the fatal 1987 flight of Dean Martin Jr. (son of the renowned “Rat Pack” entertainer).

Later in his career, Dr. Griffith became the head of radiology at Wright-Patterson Medical Center, near Dayton, Ohio, before retiring in 2005 as a lieutenant colonel.

His days as a physician, however, were not over.

After practicing at Greene Memorial Hospital and serving as Chair of Medical Imaging and on the board of Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton for several years, he joined ProScan Imaging, a highly successful teleradiology practice, partnering with them to open his own imaging center in Vandalia, Ohio.

Practicing largely out of his own home, Dr. Griffith is part of a network of board-certified and fellowship-trained radiologists providing remote MRI, CT scan, ultrasound, and X-ray interpretations.

Hanging up his aviator’s wings and following his entrepreneurial instincts allowed him to transition out of the constraints of a bigger organization and become “a larger fish in a smaller pond” – one that nevertheless requires a high degree of attention to detail, a skill he learned from his time in the Air Force.

“Military experience brings a certain discipline to what you’re doing, as well as a certain accountability,” Dr. Griffith said. “There’s an order to things and the chain of command is very important.”

Dr. Griffith still has a fondness for the military, equal to his passion for medicine and affinity for UT Southwestern.

“A lot of us were influenced by ‘Top Gun’ at the time,” Dr. Griffith said. “Then only in my mid-20s and single, I was eating that stuff up, wearing the flight suit and just hanging out with the squadron.”

Now he never misses an opportunity to fly into Dallas to attend reunion weekends. Helping physicians care for their patients and treating illness in a hands-on way is with him to this day, thanks to the training he received at UT Southwestern.

“After leaving Southwestern, I was well-prepared for what I saw in the military, even in the Air Force ER where I sometimes did shifts, or on the flight line where the focus was on battlefield medicine,” Dr. Griffith said.

His medical education also conveyed lasting benefits beyond the clinic.

“The friends I made in the military were also brothers-in-arms,” Dr. Griffith said. “Surviving the crucible of being a student at UT Southwestern was good training of my service in the military, too.”