Don Shaffer
Editor’s note: This is the final story in a series on the Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Class of 2023.
Don Shaffer had numerous highlights during his 27 years in the Air Force, including being named a training pilot right out of flight school, serving as an aide-de-camp and speechwriter to a three-star general as a captain when most staff members are of higher rank, and developing combat tactics for C-17 cargo planes.
One mission stands out, though, because he got to share it with his brother, Army Lt. Col. Emmett Shaffer.
Don Shaffer was in Germany in 2002 as expeditionary airlift squadron commander in Frankfurt and his job was to plan and execute large aircraft missions into Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Emmett called me one day, out of nowhere, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’” Don said. “’Well, I’m sitting down here in Frankfurt running an air operation. What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m sitting here at Ramstein waiting to go into Afghanistan.’ I said, ‘How are you gonna get there?’ He says, ‘Well, I’m supposed to be getting on a C-17 tomorrow,’ and he gives me the mission number. I look on our schedule, sure enough, there it is. It’s one of my birds. It’s one of my crews. So I grab my number two and I said, ‘You’ve got the squad. I’m gonna go fly.’”
“I went into base operations that morning,” Don Shaffer continued. “We picked up Emmett in the van, we drove him out to the airplane, put him in the cockpit, we got a picture of the two of us in the plane. Took off out of Ramstein, we did an air refueling flight over the Black Sea and did a night, blacked-out assault landing into Bagram Air Base, which was about half opened at the time. We were still taking fire so they kept the airfield completely blacked out at night. That was kind of neat.”
“To think that we had the opportunity of a combat operation to fly together was something really special,” said Don Shaffer, a 1982 Brookfield graduate.
Don Shaffer, left, flew his brother Emmett, right, to a military assignment in Afghanistan in 2002, the only time their military careers crossed paths during combat. Contributed photo.
Don watched his brother, who is older than him by five years, learn to fly as a teen and decided to follow that path.
“I started flying when I was about 9 years old, 10 years old,” he said. “I soloed my first time on my 16th birthday. My mother had to drive me to the airport so I could fly my airplane by myself, which was pretty interesting.”
He applied to the Air Force Academy after high school but was turned down because he didn’t have the proper “academic background.” However, the academy’s prep school sought him out and that got him on the path to flying for the Air Force.
He was trained to fly heavy airlift planes because the Air Force was cutting back on fighter pilots.
“The airplane is massive,” he said, of a C-17, the plane he eventually served his most notable missions in. A C-17 is bigger than the C-130s seen flying over Brookfield, Masury and Yankee Lake.
“Flying it, you’d never know it’s that big. It’s very agile, it’s movable. The things that that airplane is designed to do is unlike anything else you can do in an airplane.”
One tactic he developed with the C-17 was a high-altitude, steep, spiral approach into a combat zone.
“We would get over the airfield at 24,000 feet and throw the engines into reverse thrust and just fall out the sky like a rock,” Don said. “It’s quite eye-opening the first time you do it. Then, it becomes fun. What can you make this airplane do?”
Cargo plane pilots are much busier that fighter plane pilots, he said.
“Airlift world, once you get your training, your job is to be traveling, flying, going somewhere, because you’re gonna be hauling stuff from point A to Point B,” he said.
Don Shaffer said he has flown missions to every country in South America and Africa, every country in Europe except for Russia and many countries in Asia. He flew the first military mission to Hanoi since the end of the Vietnam War, transported high-ranking government and military officials around the world and flew secret missions for the military and other government organizations.
During his 27 years in the Air Force, Don Shaffer, who retired as a colonel, also spent eight years in the Pentagon, involved in operations, policy and strategy. The desk job was OK as a break, but flying was his passion, he said.
“Find something you’re passionate about and chase it,” he told a high school assembly. “When you’re in a job, make yourself the best in the world at doing that job and that’s gonna open the next door.”
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