The chief administrative officer of the Science and Technology Centre of Ukraine talks death spirals, rugby mismatches and carjackings
David Cleave, for nearly three years the chief administrative officer at the Science and Technology Centre of Ukraine, which finds alternate work for former weapons scientists, recalls with much poise his harrowing airplane adventures, but with great color his rugby stories.
A pilot for more than 20 years, Cleave only got into acrobatic flying after coming to Ukraine in 1997 to start up Raiffeisenbank, whereupon he became the first ex-pat to join the flying club based at Chaika airfield just outside of Kyiv. There, thousands of meters up in the sky one fateful day early last summer, he and his trainer Vitaliy decided to try the most dangerous of all acrobatic flying maneuvers: the death spiral.
“When we cut the motor and entered into a standard spin maneuver at 1,800 meters, we should’ve been spinning down at a steeper angle. The main thing was we got into a flat spin and couldn’t get out,” Cleave says almost deadpan sitting across from me at Sam’s Steak House. Wearing a navy blue jacket, striped shirt and tie from the 1999 rugby World Cup, he doesn’t look like a risk taker.
“We were battling with the controls for a long time, and after a while I remember thinking ‘the ground is getting really close,” but eventually we came out of it around 800 meters up,” he says. “I said ‘Wow!’ and then Vitaliy came on the intercom and said, ‘I think we ought to go back now.’ I agreed.” Cleave takes the experience in stride.
“Because I was so busy saving my life, I wasn’t really worried,” Cleave adds. With visions of the Tom Cruise blockbuster “Top Gun” in his head, he says he simply thought back to his flight training and talked himself through it, saying “Ok. How am I going to get out of this?”
After ordering a bottle of Borjomi mineral water (Hr 16), a New York steak (Hr 77) and a side of fresh vegetables (Hr 33), Cleave set to telling me about his colorful life – above the ground and on it.
Nose for the ball
Raised for the first six years of his life in Africa where his father worked as a management accountant for various corporations, Cleave was “kicked off” to boarding school in England by his parents and there quickly developed a love of rugby. To this day he uses the game as a way of breaking into the social scene of every place he’s ever studied or worked: London, Dubai, Pakistan, Budapest and now Ukraine.
Some of Cleave’s best friends and memories stem from his ties to rugby. Back in the Persian Gulf, during his time with Dubai’s National Bank of Sharjah, now the Sharjah Islamic Bank, he quickly befriended local ex-pats and helped start that country’s first ex-pat rugby side in 1980.
“I spent two years there,” he says of his time in Dubai, “most of which was spent down by the rugby club.”
Here he’s played with veterans’ sides and in the country’s first-ever beach rugby tournament, held last August in honor of his late friend Sergey Guguev. This year he hopes to play his last competitive rugby match at the tournament with his two sons, Graeme and Robin. Graeme, 19, accompanied him last November to the massive international Dubai Rugby Sevens tournament.
Cleave loves to travel to Dubai for the Dubai Sevens where he meets up with some of his old playing buddies. Last year, his 15th appearance at the tournament, Cleave played with a team mistakenly placed in the international invitational veterans’ draw. In their first match they played a New Zealand side that boasted several former international players and he feels it an accomplishment that they kept the score to just 45-0. After that, however, they won a series of games and would have won the “Plate,” or “B” side of the draw had it not been for some bad luck.
Similarly in 2000 Cleave played here with a Ukrainian veterans’ rugby side against a visiting French team that also included a formidable former international player. That player scored against them in the first minutes, worrying Cleave, but as he recalls it the players huddled up, got inspired, and wound up winning the game 45-26.
“The thing is these guys didn’t train; most of them are in their fifties and sixties. They just flicked a switch [after that score] and I just watched them play,” he says, adding that he scored the first try for his adopted side and ended up helping score more tries.
For Cleave, it seems, awkward situations usually have a lighter side.
Silver linings
In 1991 during the First Gulf War he was working in Karachi, Pakistan. With most other ex-pats having been evacuated for safety reasons, Cleave stayed behind and went to private “bunker parties” because of the imposed curfews.
“Then one day we sent our driver out in our 4×4 for some bread when he phoned to say the car had been carjacked at gunpoint. My wife said, ‘Don’t be silly! Get back here with the bread!’”
Last summer Cleave and friend Ken Rawlings decided to fly a single-engine Piper Cherokee from Suffolk, England, all the way to Kyiv.
“Touch wood the weather was great the whole way but we were denied entry into Ukrainian airspace at the Polish border,” he says over his coffee (Hr 9). They stayed the night in Rszechow, Poland, and finally made contact with Ukrainian air traffic controllers in order to resubmit their flight plan and continue.
“In fact, the Ukrainians were the most efficient, probably because they wanted to know what the hell we were doing up there.”
Sam’s Steak House
37 Zhylyanska, 287-2000.
Open daily from 11 a.m. till midnight.
English menu: Yes.
English-speaking staff: Yes.
Average price of main dish: Hr 70.10% discount with Myrovaya Karta card.
