Aviate, Navigate, Communicate: A Fighter Pilot’s Protocol for Leading Through Turbulence

Lis­ten to the Arti­cle (4:38)

I recent­ly sat down with Kim ​“KC” Camp­bell, a com­bat fight­er pilot, author of Fly­ing in the Face of Fear, and one of the most dec­o­rat­ed female avi­a­tors in US Air Force his­to­ry. In our con­ver­sa­tion, she described the emer­gency pro­to­col every avi­a­tor trains on.

Avi­ate, nav­i­gate, com­mu­ni­cate. When every­thing goes side­ways, you pri­or­i­tize in exact­ly that order. Fly the plane first. Fig­ure out where you’re going sec­ond. Then, and only then, tell any­one about it.

Watch the clip below where KC explains it in her own words.

Avi­ate, Nav­i­gate, Communicate

April 7, 2003. Baghdad.

KC’s A‑10 was hit by a sur­face-to-air mis­sile. The plane became uncon­trol­lable, point­ed nose-down at the city. She pulled back on the stick. Noth­ing happened.

She’d lost all hydraulics. What saved her wasn’t instinct. It was train­ing. She switched to a back­up sys­tem of cables and cranks, essen­tial­ly fly­ing a com­bat air­craft with no pow­er steer­ing. Then she nav­i­gat­ed west of the Tigris Riv­er to reach friend­ly ter­ri­to­ry. Then she let her flight lead know what had happened.

Avi­ate. Nav­i­gate. Com­mu­ni­cate. In that order. No steps skipped. No steps reversed.

What This Means for a CEO

Avi­ate, nav­i­gate, com­mu­ni­cate isn’t just a pro­to­col for pilots. It’s a remark­ably clean way to think about lead­ing through any moment of tur­bu­lence. Fight­er avi­a­tion and run­ning a com­pa­ny are both high-per­for­mance worlds, and here’s how each piece trans­lates to the seat a CEO sits in.

Avi­ate is fly­ing the plane: doing the hard thing even when you’re scared. KC was ter­ri­fied that day over Bagh­dad. She act­ed any­way. For a CEO, avi­ate means mak­ing the bold call: pro­tect rev­enue, pro­tect your peo­ple, keep the com­pa­ny air­borne. It takes courage, and it requires you to know your sin­gle high­est-val­ue pri­or­i­ty, the one thing that, if you stay focused on it, keeps you from hit­ting the ground.

Nav­i­gate is ori­ent­ing your­self before pan­ic takes hold. In the air, your gut can tell you one thing while real­i­ty is some­thing else entire­ly. CEOs feel this too. You can be cer­tain you’re exe­cut­ing a growth strat­e­gy, but when you audit the cal­en­dar and the plan, every­thing points toward improve­ment rather than growth. Nav­i­ga­tion means ask­ing hon­est­ly: are we point­ed where we actu­al­ly want to go, toward more cus­tomers, more mar­kets, real growth, or are we just get­ting bet­ter at what we already do?

Com­mu­ni­cate comes last, and on pur­pose. KC is clear: don’t com­mu­ni­cate until you’ve done the first two. Speak­ing too ear­ly, before the plane is sta­ble and you know where you’re going, cre­ates con­fu­sion, pan­ic, and false expec­ta­tions. The most effec­tive CEOs I know take a lit­tle longer to say some­thing pub­licly, pre­cise­ly because when they do speak, it means something.

The Part That’s Easy to Get Backwards

When things go side­ways, the nat­ur­al instinct is to com­mu­ni­cate first. Jump on a call with the board. Send an all-hands. Announce some­thing to show you’re in con­trol. It’s a very human response, and it comes from a good place.

But if you haven’t yet fig­ured out how to keep the com­pa­ny fly­ing, and you don’t know which direc­tion you’re head­ing, there isn’t much use­ful to say yet. You can end up adding noise to a cock­pit that’s already saturated.

KC put it sim­ply: ​“Focus on the things you, as the leader, can do, and leave the oth­er things for oth­ers.” Triage ruth­less­ly. Avi­ate first. The com­mu­ni­ca­tion becomes easy once you know what you’re fly­ing toward.

Chal­lenge

Next time your com­pa­ny hits tur­bu­lence, run the pro­to­col before you do any­thing else. 

• What’s the avi­ate? The one high­est-val­ue pri­or­i­ty you can­not afford to stop pursuing.
• What’s the nav­i­gate? Is your strat­e­gy actu­al­ly point­ing toward real growth, or just improvement?
• And com­mu­ni­cate only after you’ve answered both. The board, the team, and your investors will trust you more when you wait until you know what you’re fly­ing toward.

Watch the full inter­view below

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