David Greenhill, seen at his Greenhill Winery & Vineyards in Middleburg, Va. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

David Greenhill strides into his Greenhill Winery & Vineyards in Middleburg dressed for a fox hunt. It is how he spent the first few hours of this day.

I have driven 50 miles from Washington on a crisp Saturday morning to meet the Air Force Academy dropout who holds a master’s in philosophical theology from Yale.

The Virginia squire look belies the serious businessman underneath. Greenhill owns the winery we are in. He also owns the local Middleburg Life monthly magazine, faithful chronicler of the horsy set.

But that’s not what brought me here. Greenhill’s main pursuit is a $200 million-plus global telecommunications company called Satcom Direct, of which he is part owner.

Satcom Direct provides cybersecure phone and Internet service to nearly 10,000 noncommercial aircraft around the world. Among the thousands of clients it connects are Air Force One, NetJets, the U.S. Coast Guard, heads of state, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and hundreds of chief executives.

Satcom Direct has more than 350 employees in offices around the world, including London, Hong Kong, Geneva, Moscow, Dubai, South Africa and Australia.

Its sweet spot is providing clients the ability to conduct business while flying at 40,000 feet.

“Serving Fortune 500 companies is the biggest portion of the business,” said Greenhill, 49, who is president of Satcom Direct. He owns the company with its chief executive, Jim Jensen.

In addition to business aviation and government/military communications, Satcom Direct allows people to connect with one another from land or offshore.

Satcom Direct plays in a highly technical, competitive space. Rockwell Collins and Honeywell are its chief rivals.

Greenhill said he and Jensen have had offers to buy the company, but he would not say from whom or for how much. When I asked him whether it was worth more than $1 billion, I was met with silence.

Greenhill travels constantly. Except for polo and the occasional fox hunt, he doesn’t relax much. A typical day is 15 hours. I had to chase him by phone all over the planet.

“I have more than 350 paychecks I have to earn every two weeks,” he said, explaining his schedule.

Satcom Direct is headquartered in an $11 million building it owns in Melbourne, Fla., where at least 150 employees maintain a mission control center that tracks the communications connections of every aircraft it services.

Next door is a state-of-the-art data center designed to keep Satcom Direct’s client communications cybersecure.

“You have Fortune 500 executives flying at 40,000 feet around the world, and they can be susceptible to hackers,” he said. “We created a state-of-the-art data center next to our main office to ensure the data and information were secure from cyberattack.”

He compares the Melbourne operation to NASA’s mission control in Houston.

“It’s manned 24/7. We have people looking at screens full time, watching planes,” he said. “So if a communications system fails, if there is an equipment failure, we can isolate and resolve it.”

Greenhill grew up in North Carolina. His father worked in insurance, and his mother was a homemaker.

Young Greenhill wanted to be a pilot.

“I started flying when I was 14,” he said.

He joined the U.S. Air Force as a teenager and worked as a ground crew member based in Britain before being accepted at the Air Force Academy in 1987. He wanted to fly fighter jets.

When his prospects of becoming a pilot dimmed because of military cutbacks, Greenhill quit the Air Force Academy and entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He graduated with a degree in economics in 1991.

“I thought, if I was going to be a civilian, I needed to know something about business,” he said. “It was for purely practical reasons.”

He earned his master’s in philosophical theology from Yale in 1993. Why religion? Because understanding religion was the key to understanding other cultures and their people, he said. He thought it would help him in international business.

Next, he worked five years in North Carolina in international shipping. He got a job in Washington in 1998 selling laptop-size cellphones so media companies such as Fox, ABC, CBS, the New York Times and The Washington Post could file their reports from remote locations.

“This was pre-cellular technology,” he said.

One of his customers was Jensen, who brought Greenhill on as a partner in 2002 when Satcom Direct was a tiny, five-person operation.

Jensen handled the technical and support side of the business. Greenhill tackled sales.

“My job was growing the company,” he said. “Jim was an engineer. And he knew the maintenance and avionics guys. We complemented each other.”

They created key partnerships with satellite equipment suppliers and satellite operators.

Greenhill saw the supplier connections as a way to bring in business through word-of-mouth. If a customer called a supplier and said they wanted to activate a phone, the supplier would recommend Satcom Direct.

“It was forging good partnerships and relationships, good customer support and services.”

Another aspect to lure customers was automation. Many of the ins and outs of running noncommercial aircraft operations were still done on paper and whiteboards. And at the time, cellphone technology allowed phone calls from an aircraft to the ground, but it was nearly impossible to call an aircraft from the ground.

“We came up with value-added service, being able to call the aircraft by phone,” he said. “Being able to track maintenance, track logbooks, insurance, scheduling, warranties, maintenance, engine inspection, insurance. We took the whiteboard and turned it into a computer dashboard.”

They were obsessed with reliability and cybersecurity, convinced that if executives and VIPs (such as the president) could count on uninterrupted service, business would follow.

“Lots of times, if the phones were not working, executives wouldn’t fly,” he said.

Revenue climbed to $25 million by 2008. Then $100 million five years later. Revenue will exceed $200 million this year. The company is lucrative.

Greenhill would not discuss profit, but pretax profit could be as high as $40 million, leaving several million for net profit. Enough to buy a $50 million company from Airbus that came with land-based satellite links — one on each U.S. coast — that cemented their cybersecurity strategy. They also this year bought two other companies that add more products to the automated dashboard: Ohio-based AircraftLogs and TrueNorth Avionics, based in Canada.

“Eighty percent of what we net, we reinvest in the business,” Greenhill said.

While he and Jensen continue to chase growth, Greenhill has used some of the profits for earthly pursuits.

He has made a splash in Middleburg since buying the former Swedenburg Winery for $3.3 million in 2013. It produces around $1.5 million in revenue from 60,000 bottles with vintages named “philosophy,” “mythology,” “ontology” and “superstition” — all from his time studying at Yale.

He bought Middleburg Life for $400,000 last year.

Both the winery and magazine make money on an operating basis, he said.

Greenhill bought the winery, which includes a home, for business reasons as well as personal.

“I always traveled a lot with work, and I was just looking for land,” he said. “If I could own land that produces revenue, that’s kind of cool.”

He has also taken up polo.

Why?

“When you are on the polo field, business does not enter my mind. It’s kind of become an addiction.”

I’m not sure whether he is talking about business or polo when he refers to the addiction.