36. The US Navy Blue Angels: Public Affairs and Marketing at 500 Miles Per Hour

Lead Balloon - Public Relations, Marketing and Strategic Communications Stories

The U.S. Navy Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron is not only the world’s most well-known group of elite performing aviators.

It’s also—and people forget this—a group of elite public affairs and marketing practitioners.

From the pilots to the technicians turning wrenches on the planes, every Blue Angels team member is trained to uphold the unit's 76 years of tradition and legacy. As a brand management exercise, there is perhaps no other initiative in the world as rigorous and disciplined.

And at the heart of this publicity apparatus is a small but extraordinary group of public and media relations practitioners whose duties would literally make most strategic communicators pass out.

The Blue Angels public affairs team operates under grueling physical conditions, works brutal hours and is held to meticulous standards befitting one of the most storied aviation units in history, where the stakes are always life and death.

They populate social media accounts on behalf of the Blue Angels brand, coordinate ride-alongs with local media and VIPs, and are even called upon to fly photography missions with the squadron, experiencing the same adverse G-forces as the pilots themselves.

We wanted to tell the story... of the people who tell the Blue Angels' story, embedding with the Blue Angels Public Affairs team for the first segment in this two-part series.

So in this episode, we meet the team as they prepare for and fly at the Chicago Air and Water show, one of more than 60 air shows the Blue Angels headline across North America each year.

The Blue Angels are supported by a team of more than 150 U.S. Navy and Marine Corps personnel, and we meet a number of them, including:

• Executive Officer, Commander Jon Fay
• Maintenance Officer, Lt. Commander Brian Abe
• #7 Pilot and Narrator, Lt. Commander Griffin Stangel
• Public Affairs Chief MCC Paul Archer
• Public Affairs Specialist MC1 Cody Deccio
• Public Affairs Specialist MC1 Bobby Baldock
• Public Affairs Specialist MC2 Cody Hendrix

Special thanks as well to Blue Angels Public Affairs Officer Lt. Chelsea Dietlin for helping coordinate Lead Balloon's embed with the squadron, as well as Jim Schlueter, Paul Guse and Dave Oates.

Watch a video preview of next month's epic season finale with the Blue Angels.

Subscribe to the Podcamp Media e-newsletter to be notified when we post video of this extraordinary experience.

Special music for this episode was performed and recorded by Ty Christian and Brian Koenig of the metal act Lords of the Trident, which is touring this fall in the U.S., Canada and Japan.

Additional music by Michael Briguglio, the Revolution and the Realist.

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