Dan Hampton On Malaysia Flight MH370
Colonel Dan Hampton On Malaysia Flight MH370 – Fox & Friends Sunday 3/16/2014 Dan Hampton delivers a rare, firsthand perspective on modern warfare, leadership under…
Thought Leader: Dan Hampton
Dan Hampton: Veteran of the Month
Retired Lt. Col. Dan Hampton went from being a U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter pilot to writing about men who love flying: himself and Charles Lindbergh. Hampton, 53, who hails from a family of aviators, took his first flying lesson at age 15. He recalls his feet and hands immediately knowing what to do, as if by instinct.
Those instincts would later serve him well as an F-16 pilot, who fought in Kosovo and both Gulf Wars and whose wildly dangerous job it was to draw fire from surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), then return to destroy the firing sites. But one day in 2003, Hampton got the call for a different kind of mission: A Marine company was cut off in southern Iraq, with enemy forces and a massive sandstorm closing in.
The Marines needed emergency close air support, in the worst possible weather for flying. Amid a chaos of screamed radio calls, low-fuel alarms, anti-aircraft fire and blowing sand, Hampton dove below the storm and strafed a column to halt its advance on the stranded men.
The Marines were out of immediate danger, but Hampton and the other fighters still faced a high-risk landing—at night, into a howling maw of sand. As senior officer, it fell to him to create an electronic path of sorts for the pilots to follow, flying blind on instruments to the nearest forward airfield—in Kuwait.
He led them in and touched down last, exhausted after 11 hours in the air, just as the runway dissolved into a black wall of sand. “My mind and my hands and feet went into overdrive,” he recalls.
Hampton laughs that after experiences like that, he has no need for mid-life crises. Instead, in his retirement, he has put aside the sword and taken up the pen. His best-selling 2012 memoir, Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat, describes his high-octane life as a “Wild Weasel” SAM-killer who flew 151 combat missions and won four Distinguished Flying Crosses with Valor and a Purple Heart. His latest book explores a different kind of flying. The Flight: Charles Lindbergh’s Daring and Immortal 1927 Transatlantic Crossing (out May 16) marks the 90th anniversary of the famous passage that forever shrunk the world and expanded man’s horizons.
In the book, Hampton focuses on Lindbergh’s 33½-hour crossing, carrying readers into the icy cockpit, a thousand-mile storm at sea and the mind of a pioneer pilot—as only a fellow aviator could. Hampton has flown the route himself and understands the unimaginable risks Lindbergh was taking, in an era before aviation maps, anti-icing tech, solid weather forecasting or instruments that made flying in clouds vastly safer.
“Everybody that had tried it cracked up or died,” says Hampton. “Despite all these horrible risks, he did it anyway.”
In Lindbergh, Hampton sees a kindred spirit—a natural pilot, loner, and nonconformist who so preferred depending on himself alone that he chose to brave the crossing without a co-pilot. “Individualism—an excellent trait to have as a single-seat pilot,” says Hampton. But Lindbergh himself admitted that when he was closest to death over the Atlantic, he did not feel alone. In his memoir, The Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh describes phantom voices “advising me on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me…”
When asked if he’d ever experienced such a thing, Hampton pauses and laughs. “I’ve seen a lot of strange things flying,” he says. “There were many times when I was a split second away from dying and was able to save myself. I have no explanation for it. Sixth sense? Maybe inspiration? Maybe that’s what these voices were for Lindbergh.
“Whether it was real or imagined, he believed in it, and it did the trick and kept him alive,” adds Hampton. “I believe in it too.”
Dan Hampton delivers a rare, firsthand perspective on modern warfare, leadership under pressure, and global risk, shaped by his experience flying combat missions. His gripping storytelling and real-time geopolitical insights resonate with corporate leaders, defense audiences, and organizations navigating uncertainty. Event planners value his ability to translate high-stakes experiences into actionable lessons on resilience, decision-making, and performance at the highest level. Contact us to learn more.
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