Thomas “Tom” Irlbeck, an original “Top Gun” instructor who often saw the world from a higher place, lived and died doing his lifelong passion of flying.
A winter Cape Coral resident since 2003, Tom Irlbeck, 74, flew often, and he flew almost everywhere and in almost every type of airplane.
He flew almost 200 missions for the U.S. Navy in the F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber jet during the Vietnam War, stationed on the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier.
He flew up the ranks after the war, becoming one of the 18 original instructors at the Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor Program in Miramar, California. It became known as “Top Gun” and was portrayed in the 1986 Tom Cruise movie.
Irlbeck flew for several commercial airlines, including Northwest Airlines as an A320 jet airliner captain. He later built his own airplane, an RV-8, a single-engine, low-wing plane. It had 20,000 rivets in it. He flew that, too.
He flew often with his oldest son, Jon, in a Cessna 180. They would land on various ice lakes in Minnesota, carrying a portable ice fishing tent for their winter adventures.
In November, he became the first to fly a friend’s custom-built plane, reminiscent of a 1930s-era WACO biplane, one of the first models of its kind.
Irlbeck's family and friends expressed shock over his death April 14 in a glider crash. Irlbeck's glider, the SZD-48 Jantar Standard 2, crashed at 3:30 p.m. that Saturday near Helms Road and Forrey Drive in LaBelle. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. Friends and family are convinced the cause could not have been pilot error.
“Everybody was stunned, because he was such a precise flier,” said Katy Irlbeck, Tom’s wife of 48 years.
“He was kind of larger than life,” said Doug Weiler, a longtime friend and fellow pilot in Irlbech’s northern home in Wisconsin. “He had quite a reputation up in this area. He did a lot of rides. He did a fair amount of flight instructing in this area for people building the RV plane like we did. I think at one point in time, he tested almost 40 different airplanes of different types for different people.”
Katy and Tom Irlbeck met when they both served in the Navy.
“He loved teaching the kids," she said. "He was very kind, very nice and very intense. He knew right from wrong. He knew the way he wanted things done. He didn’t back down at all.”
Katy Irlbeck said he pushed his fighter pilot students, “the best of the best,” to get even more out of them.
“He didn’t give them any leeway,” she said. “He had a good time with them.”
When the movie “Top Gun” came out in 1986, it gave Irlbeck's children a different glimpse of the man they called Dad. By then, he was flying commercially.
“I didn’t even understand that he did that until the movie came out,” said Jon Irlbeck, Tom’s oldest son, 48, and a commercial pilot for 24 years. His dad taught him to fly when he was 14. His first flying memory with his father included his brother, Kevin. They were 7 and 4 at the time. Jon sat in the front and Kevin in the back of the plane.
“He was doing these over-the-hill maneuvers,” Jon Irlbeck said. “My brother’s in the backseat, three years younger than me. You get a little weightless in your seat. You kind of float against your seat belt a little bit. Like astronaut training.
“I was a little bit nervous, and my brother thought it was the greatest thing in the whole wide world. And I ended up becoming a pilot, and he ended up losing interest.
“I think he was probably hoping that one of us would want to be a pilot, but he made it very clear that we had to want to do it ourselves. I think it was just the spirit of adventure in your life. Do you want to spend it in an office? Or do you want to be out and about and experiencing it through the air and being a part of the atmosphere. It just seemed normal to me from my earliest years.”
Bill Bresnan, president of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) Chapter 66 in Fort Myers, spent 10 years building a 1930s-era biplane, one he named after his granddaughter, Lillian Rose. Tom Irlbech logged 33.7 hours between October and January becoming the first to test-fly it for his friend.
“He worked out all the bugs and things,” Bresnan said. “I was heavily honored. He was willing to risk his life on my plane. I was just honored that he would trust my craftsmanship. It goes back to the roots of aviation. Knowing that this was the end of life, he got to experience the earliest days of aviation.
“That was the 50th test flight he’s done. My plane was the 18th different type of plane that he’s flown. I learned so much from him already. I was hoping to learn so much more from him. He spent more time in the air than on the ground. He had like 30,000 hours of flying time. That’s unheard of.”
Added up, the time amounts to 3.4 continuous years of flying.
Kevin Irlbeck, 45, veered away from the pilot career path. He is a medical device representative in Minnesota. He flew to be with his mom, family and friends so he could attend the celebration of his dad’s life at 5 p.m. Saturday at the EAA Building at Page Field in Fort Myers.
“He was just a passionate outdoorsman,” Kevin Irlbeck said. “Fishing, hunting, biking, boating.”
The Irlbeck family had an airstrip and a hangar within sight of their backyard in Somerset, Wisconsin, where they lived from 1970-2015. Tom and Katy Irlbeck had been spending their recent summers in Bayport, Minnesota, but he still had a hangar in Osceola, Wisconsin, from where he flew his glider.
The Irlbeck's Cape Coral winter home has a canal and a boat behind the backyard. Tom Irlbeck organized neighborhood bike rides throughout Cape Coral when he wasn’t flying or boating. But his eyes often were looking upward.
Whenever Bresnan and Irlbeck drove to the Punta Gorda Airport together, Bresnan said he often noticed Irlbeck looking out the window at birds navigating through air patterns and the surrounding clouds.
“If there’s any reincarnation, he’s going to ask to come back as an eagle or something,” Bresnan said. “He just loved being in the air.”
Donations in Tom Irlbeck’s name can be made to the EAA Chapter 66 Hangar Fund, P.O. Box 60204, Fort Myers, Florida, 33906.