Editor’s note: This interview has been adapted from an episode of The Helicopter Podcast and edited for length, clarity, and flow. Responses may combine excerpts from longer answers while maintaining the speaker’s original intent.
Vertical Plus: You’ve had a remarkable career. Can you walk us through your time in the 160thSpecial Operations Aviation Regiment — what you did there, and where you are now?
Ryan Walters: I matured very quickly and progressed very quickly. By 30 years old, I was a lead pilot and standards pilot there — the person that could go out and lead the formation and be the flight lead for any complex special operations mission, which is crazy when I think back at that still.
I’ve been retired now, but even in the civil helicopter segment, you run into so many people from industry, or in the military, or people who you worked with in the past. When I retired, I worked in healthcare first, and then in the aerospace and defense industry.
V:What first sparked your interest in aviation, and when did you realize it was something you wanted to pursue?
R.W.: I grew up in Southern California in the Los Angeles County area. My whole world growing up was the high deserts, riding motorcycles and horses, and living up in the mountains. I remember as a nine-or 10-year-old boy, it was normal for fighter jets to fly over my parents’ property. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool.’ You would just hear them all day.
My parents used to take us to air shows. I’ve got stacks of old photos, just standing in front of a lot of helicopters and planes. I was always intrigued by aviation. Growing up in California, we had brush fires everywhere. You’d always see LA County Fire Department out fighting fires. Helicopters were just cycling in. I remember saying, ‘That would be cool to do someday,’ never knowing that I would have the chance to go do it.
V: You’ve spoken about struggling in school. How did that period shape your path, and what led you to the military?
R.W.: I actually did very, very poorly in high school. I didn’t feel academically ready, and I didn’t feel like I was really prepared to go to college.
I got to that crossroad where I was out of high school, I’ve got to do something, and I actually was talked to about doing an Army Ranger contract. I wasn’t even really considering the military.
Guidance from my parents was, ‘You’re going to go to college. Figure out how to pay for it and get accepted, or get a job and work full time, or go join the military.’ I chose the military route.
I wouldn’t have known it at the time, but looking back, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Everything I’ve accomplished in my life — everything I have with my family — all came from that decision. Even though there were those first few months or years where I really wondered if I made the right call, I look back now and think, that was pretty wild.
V: At what point did you realize you wanted to move from being a Ranger to flying, and what made aviation feel like the right path?
R.W.: After riding in the back of those helicopters as a Ranger, I realized this Warrant Officer Program allows you to go fly and you don’t have to necessarily have a college degree right away. I’m like, I could actually go do this.
I still had to adapt and overcome, just to get through the testing, packet, and the application process to go to flight school. I was terrible at math, but everything’s learnable. So I put together the packet, and was accepted to flight school.
V: You were accepted into flight school just before 9/11. How did that moment shape the start of your aviation career?
R.W.: That would forever change the course of my career. I think many of us showing up at that time had in the back of our mind that this could get bigger, and that we could be on our way to combat shortly after graduating flight school.
So going through flight school, a war campaign had kicked off — not quite large-scale yet — and we carried that awareness with us.
Certainly, the course of many of my friends’ careers would be very, very focused on almost two decades of combat between Iraq, Afghanistan, and other global flare-ups.
V: What do you remember about your first deployment as a new pilot, and what did that experience teach you early on?
R.W.: As a brand-new pilot, the first time I touched a helicopter outside of flight training was in Iraq. I was a brand-new Warrant Officer 1, living in kind of a bombed-out MiG fighter bunker that was partially collapsed.
We were just doing medical evacuation coverage, so if anybody hit an improvised explosive device or soldiers got shot, we would haul ass out to the aircraft, jump in, grab a grid coordinate, and off we went.
You just get super laser focused. You want to get there, get the patient on board, get the treatment started, and get them back as quick as possible. Speed is everything in that case.
My whole first year as a pilot was doing that. Every mission was different, and you’re quickly having to process what went right and what went wrong, and figure out how to do better on the next one — sometimes an hour later.
So it was a very, very steep learning curve for me, but by the end of that rotation, I felt like I had become a lot more competent in a very short period of time.
V: After that first deployment, what pushed you to take the next step and pursue the 160thSpecial Operations Aviation Regiment?
R.W.: I wanted something more, and that was really the drive to go after the 160th. My experience with them was being a customer, riding in the back and seeing that there’s one level of aviation support, and then there’s top shelf, top-tier support.
Seeing the writing on the wall that we were involved in two conflict areas, my wife and I looked at it like, if we’re going to keep doing this, we might as well stack the odds in our favor and try to be part of the premier organization — the one that’s going to teach you how to be the best.
V: The 160this known as one of the most selective aviation units in the world. What does the selection process actually look like, and what are they looking for?
R.W.: You can’t just go there. You have to go through an assessment, and a lot of it is a character evaluation. Is this someone who’s trainable, and can they adapt to our way of doing business?
There are physical requirements as well — fitness tests, a swim test — and it all culminates in an aviation flight test.
They put you in an aircraft — no external aids, no tools, no GPS — and you have to go from point A to point B and land within a very tight time window, plus or minus 30 seconds.
It’s about a week-long process. It’s certainly not easy, and the attrition rate is pretty astronomically high, which is good because in the end, you want people who can adapt to the system and ultimately become very competent leaders.
They decided to take a chance on me, and since they did, I decided to give it 100%.
V: Recent operations — including the widely reported mission in Venezuela — have brought renewed attention to the 160th. From your experience, how do missions like that come together behind the scenes?
R.W.: Missions like that don’t just get executed overnight. It can take weeks, months — in some cases, even years — to develop and refine a plan.
When you look at something that’s so well executed, it comes down to phenomenal training and strict adherence to high standards and SOPs. If you do nothing more than meet those standards, you’re already exceeding most expectations.
You build a solid foundation, then start working through the worst-case scenarios so that when those things happen, you’re mentally prepared and not reacting in the moment.
The base plan is a well-oiled machine, but when things go sideways — as they often do — everyone knows how to switch gears. The plan shifts, and you still have to execute to the same high standard.
V: Looking back on your time in the 160th, are there any missions or moments that have stayed with you?
R.W.: There are those super high-visibility missions, but for me, I like to talk about the normal, day-to-day ones — the ones that don’t make headlines.
There was a mission in 2012 — a Doctors Without Borders doctor had been captured — and it was going to be a fairly complex air mission because of the terrain. It was dark out, with no illumination — not the easiest conditions to fly in.
As soon as the team got to the objective, the first SEAL who entered the room was shot. The SEAL behind him continued the mission, rescued the hostage, and then we had to get everyone out.
I still remember the radio calls and the sequence of events from that night, but the biggest thing that stood out was the level of sacrifice. Even knowing he was gravely wounded, his teammates did everything they could — performing CPR in the back of the helicopter — just because there was still a chance.
When I look back, that was a display of the very best of our country — people giving everything they had, just because there was a chance.
That’s what has left the biggest impact on me: seeing people step up to levels they probably didn’t think they could reach.
V:After everything you’ve experienced — from combat to special operations — how has that shaped your perspective on life today?
R.W.: It’s certainly helped a lot. After I retired, I worked in healthcare and in the aerospace and defense industry, and you see how people can get worked up over certain things. For me, it’s more about saying, ‘OK, let’s sit down, talk this through, and figure out how critical this really is. Let’s work together and get through it.’
The other piece of it is the burden on families. Your family carries so much. My wife is trying to keep everything wings level at home, and that was probably more difficult than any deployment I’ve ever been on.
My wife is much stronger than I am, and if it wasn’t for her, I probably wouldn’t be here — to be quite honest with you.
When I look back, time is our most precious resource.