Tom Green, is a local boy, having grown up in nearby McMinnville, where he was well known as the tall kid in the geeky glasses who played with radios and rode around on his Whizzer motor-assisted bicycle.

Tom survived his years of playing in traffic (there was a lot less traffic in the ‘60s) to graduate from Linfield College (in downtown McMinnville) in 1968.
 He celebrated his newly acquired BS in Physics by resurrecting a 1952 Chevy pick-up and driving it down the West Coast of America to San Diego. Here was a new concept! Imagine December without gray skies and rain….what to do with the gift of these extra months of sunshine? Tom (then and now) was great reader, and during his bookish travels had read many stories of the sea. San Diego is a sea-going kind of town and soon enough he was at the waterfront, hanging on the railings and looking at boats.

Eventually, he managed to find a berth as a mechanic/dogsbody on a 110’ schooner bound to Panama and the Caribbean. He was soon conversant with the basics of blue water sailing and the skills needed to keep a sailing vessel in good repair while underway. Unfortunately, it didn’t pay a living wage, so Tom returned to Oregon and, after a brief stint as refrigeration mechanic at a vegetable cannery, found a job at the Oregon Health Sciences University. This turned out to be a great match.

All his life, Tom had been a hands-on mechanical type, which, when combined with his physics background and inquiring mind, made him the perfect person to design and build equipment for medical research. "There’s a lot of things I don’t know," according to Tom, "but I can tell you how to design a machine to answer the burning question ‘does gamma globulin pass through the placenta of guinea pigs?’. We did a lot of research into fetal and neo-natal heart development. There really wasn’t a lot knowledge, so whenever the doctors had chemical or bio-electric questions, we had to design experiments and tools to find the answers. Of course, once we had data, we had to have some way to correlate it into useful formats, so along with machine design, I also got into data processing."

After a few years on "Pill Hill", a friend of Tom’s took him for a ride in a Piper Warrior. Tom’s reaction was immediate. "About the time we leveled out, I was wondering where this had been all my life. Within two weeks, I was taking flying lessons. I soon had my pilot’s license and went the usual rental aircraft route for a few years."

About then he met Susan, who also worked at OHSU, and they were married in 1975. Susan was not afraid of adventure, so in 1981 they made the joint decision that life was too short to spend it all in a laboratory or an office. They purchased a 28’ Cape Dory sloop and made plans to sail the South Pacific. "We got off to rough start." Tom remembers." Our first passage was thirteen days, a lot of it in bad weather, from Portland to Morro Bay, California. From there we sailed to Hawaii, making the passage in 21 days. After spending a little time there, we left for the Marquesas and spent about six months sailing the reefs and islands of that part of the South Pacific. On the way back, we called at Hawaii again. If you’re sailing from Hawaii to the Northwest US, the prevailing wind patterns more or less dictate that you sail north, almost to the Aleutians, before you can turn east to the continent. We spent watches bundled up in everything we had, trying to stay warm…it was tough to remember the sun and warmth of Tahiti. Very little about long distance sailing is just ‘fun’…interesting, yes, demanding, always, but it’s rarely relaxing. Up north on our return leg, we had the scariest moment of the trip. The shipping lanes between Japan and the North American continent pass through the same waters. One night, a really dark night, I was on deck bundled to my eyeballs in a sleeping bag and trying to stay awake. A huge black vertical wall came out of the black and murmured past us, about 200 yards away. Not a light was showing, and I really doubt there was anyone on watch. There wasn’t a thing we could do to get out of the way, and if that freighter had been one or two ship lengths further south, nobody would ever have known what happened to us."

After their return, Tom went back to work at OHSU and started flying again. Soon, he and Susan owned a Cessna Cardinal and over the next four years flew it about 350 hours, including a trip to Alaska. Their hangar at Hillsboro, Oregon, was within influence range of a few crazy guys building airplanes, most of them all-metal go-fast things called, for some reason, RVs. Building an airplane had never really occurred to Tom…but once he’d seen an RV takeoff once or twice, the seed was planted. It didn’t take long before he was bashing rivets, too. He and his friend Dan Delano bought two early RV-6 kits and worked on the projects in tandem. Both airplanes flew in 1990 and have flown steadily ever since. It’s easy to tell Tom’s…he replaced the baggage windows with gull wing doors, and painted a stealthy gray N-number on the unpainted fuselage. It’s a very simple airplane, and even with a recent engine change to a 180 hp/Sensenich metal prop, it still weighs less than 1000 lbs.

After 23 years of medical research, the thrill was gone, so Tom started casting about for a new career. In 1994 he came to work for Van’s as technical assistance guy. He also managed some programs and helped on the business end. In 1998, the 55 hour weeks, the long commute from his home on the other side of Portland and the demands of Susan’s new job with some upstart software company (Oracle) he cut back to part time. Then, in April 2000, we got the awful phone call and learned that General Manager Bill Benedict and his son Jeremy had been lost. Tom agreed to come back and take on the General Manager role…and in that capacity has overseen the move to the new Aurora facility, the introduction of the RV-9/9A, and Van’s steady expansion. In December of 2003 Tom became the President of Van's Aircraft, Inc.