When Leadership Meets Life and Death Risk

October 12, 2025 by Mike Manazir – (4-5 minutes)

How Accepting Risk Reshaped the Way I led- and How You Lead Today

The Call from the Desert

It was a cold, black December night in Fallon. As I walked toward my F-14 Tomcat, my friend Neil “Eddie” Jones leaned against a hangar wall and said, “Night flights always suck when it’s really dark.” It was the last thing he ever said to me.

Heading to the rendezvous point after takeoff, Eddie and his back-seater Scott “Dinger” Walldinger slammed into the Nevada desert at over 500 miles an hour. I was airborne when the radio crackled: “Aircraft 105 down. Terminate the exercise.”

I was the squadron Safety Officer. The investigation was mine.

The Crash Site

At dawn, we rumbled across the desert in old pickup trucks, guided by handheld GPS. What we found will never leave me—a two-mile fan of wreckage and small purple flags marking every human fragment. The bitter cold, the silence, the purple streamers fluttering against the sand—all reminders that two friends were gone in an instant.

For days we combed the crash site, collecting aircraft parts into twenty-six giant boxes. Each represented a piece of a puzzle we desperately needed to solve. When the helicopter finally arrived to lift the boxes out, two toppled, spilling aircraft pieces back across the desert floor.

Our hearts sank—but we finished the job. Engineers later found the cause: a worn hydraulic tube rubbed by a wire bundle. Sparks ignited a fine mist of hydraulic fluid—creating a blowtorch that melted the flight controls. The jet became uncontrollable. Eddie’s stick no longer moved the airplane.

Why didn’t they eject? We never knew. Perhaps the jet briefly stabilized, fooling them into thinking control had returned. They hit the desert before they knew it. We held a wake at the Miramar O Club.

Crash Site #2 — Nashville

Five years later, I was nearly done with Tomcat refresher training when breaking news flashed—an F-14 had crashed into a Nashville neighborhood. Civilian homes destroyed. Fatalities reported. Thirty minutes later, I was on a Navy transport with the three-star admiral who commanded all of Naval Aviation.

The scene was devastation—smoldering houses, twisted metal, and two aircrew who never stood a chance. The pilot was Stacy Bates—my former Plebe from the Naval Academy. His parents had watched him take off that morning. They learned of his death on the restaurant TV during breakfast. Tragically, they had already lost Stacy’s brother in a training accident. Two sons lost; two families forever changed.

The Lesson

Those tragedies marked the turning point in my understanding of leadership in naval aviation. I now realized viscerally that I belonged to a profession of high risk—not just for myself but for those under my command. Every order carried the weight of another person’s life. Before that flash of understanding, I knew I was in an environment fraught with risk, but the weight of it didn’t hit me until after that second mishap.

My duty became clear:

Train and prepare your people—negligence is unforgivable.
Accept the weight of command—some missions demand hard choices.

Making the right decision doesn’t guarantee the desired outcome. And not getting your desired outcome doesn’t mean you made the wrong decision. Leadership always carries risk.

How This Applies to You

In business, your team’s physical lives may not be at stake, but their living lives are—their families, mortgages, and sense of worth. Your decisions ripple through every household you lead. When you lead well, you shield people from layoffs, preserve their stability, and give them hope. Fail, and the cost is measured in lost jobs, broken morale, and fractured families.

So, face the risk. Rise to your responsibility. Train your team, care for them, and lead them to win. Because leadership isn’t about your pain—it’s about the pain of everyone who follows you.

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P.S.

If this message stirred something in you—share it. Forward it to a friend, colleague, or your leadership team. Better yet—let’s talk.

Let’s raise up a generation of leaders who know how to Lead to Win.

Mike Manazir
Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.)
Author of Learn How to Lead to Win

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