From Childhood Colin “Pappy” Boynton Dreamed of Gold Wings

Walking home from school one day in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley town of Staunton, VA, 12-year-old Colin “Pappy” Boynton heard a loud noise.

Looking up, he saw a Navy F-4 Phantom jet flying right above him at low altitude. “I remember time seemed to freeze for a moment as I looked up, and I could see the back seater looking down at me. Then, the entire world turned into thunder as they went by,” Pappy recalls. “I decided then and there that’s what I wanted to do.”

Pappy says this incident turned him into a “total nerd” on the topic of flying. On a school field trip to Washington DC, “I’m the kid who bought the 40-pound book at the Air and Space Museum and lugged it around for the rest of the day while everybody made fun of me,” he recalls. (Incidentally, he still has the book.)

Once he started learning about military aviation, Pappy quickly decided he wanted to join the Navy. “I came to the conclusion that landing on boats was hard,” he says. “That’s where my head was at as a kid — the Navy lands on ships, so they must be better, and therefore I wanted to be that.”

Navy Career

Like all Navy pilots, Pappy learned to fly in a two-seat propeller aircraft, which for him was the T-34C. After primary flight training, he decided anything with a stick was probably fun to fly and anything with a yoke was probably not. With this in mind, he chose jets and helicopters. (“I’ve since flown both, and while they very different they are both are a hoot,” he quips).

He ended up spending the next 20 years flying helicopters and absolutely loving it. “As I tell people who are just getting into this business, everybody has strong opinions about what it is they want to fly. Almost nobody gets their first choice, and everybody falls in love with what they wind up doing,” he says.

“It becomes about the amazing people that you’re with, and then you start jealously defending the community against all naysayers.”

His callsign comes from the 1970s TV show “Black Sheep Squadron,” which recounts the adventures of real-life World War II Marine Gregory “Pappy” Boyingnton. “I was familiar with the Hollywood retelling of that tale when I was a kid and was utterly unsurprised when that became my callsign literally five minutes after arriving at my first fleet squadron,” says Pappy.

At various points in his career, Pappy managed and worked with maintainers, the enlisted sailors who take care of the aircraft. He says troubleshooting issues with the maintenance crews helped him learn infinitely more about his aircraft than reading the manual.

For four years, Pappy served as a Seahawk Weapons and Tactics Instructor at what was then known as the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center in Fallon, NV. Other Navy roles include being the officer in charge of a two-aircraft detachment doing counter piracy off the Somali coast; running helicopter operational tests for the Navy; overseeing the Navy and Marine Corps’ only helicopter developmental test squadron; and directing studies that influenced what the Navy invested in for its future capability.

Rewards and Successes

Pappy discovered two big passions in the Navy — taking care of the sailors that worked on the aircraft and training aircrew. “They’re very different tasks, but both very rewarding,” he says.

Though he originated some tactics and concepts that are still being taught today, Pappy considers his biggest accomplishment to be the successful careers that a sizable number of the people he has trained and mentored have had.

“As I look back at what I’ve done, it’s all about the people,” he says. “It’s lieutenants that I’ve had long conversations with. It’s being retired and having sailors that worked for me call me up to have me re-enlist them or to tell me that they got promoted. It’s knowing that I made an impact because, ultimately, I always wanted the people who worked for me to know that I cared about them and what happened to them.”

He’s thankful for the support of his wife, who has been with him through all the moves and deployments. With three daughters — the oldest is a sophomore at Bryn Mawr College and the other two are in high school — Pappy is outnumbered by girls. But the family also has two corgis, one of which is a male, “so there’s at least one more boy in the house,” he jokes.

Joining 2 Circle

Before he retired from the Navy, Pappy says he spent a lot of time thinking about what he wanted to do next.

He made two personal discoveries: First, he immensely enjoys being surrounded by people who are exceptionally good at what they do and who also care deeply about it.

Second, he realized there was no way he could ever bring himself to care about something like Amazon’s quarterly profit margin. But he did care deeply about aircrew and maintainers in naval aviation.

It was these two discoveries that led Pappy to join 2 Circle as a Senior Warfare Analyst in May 2021. “It’s like you haven’t left the family,” Pappy says. “2 Circle is unique in that the Fleet sees us as being their advocates instead of trying to sell something. I look left and right at company meetings at the amount of talent that we’ve got, and it’s pretty silly.”

At 2 Circle, Pappy conducts warfare analysis based on classified intelligence and technical data to help inform decision makers on acquisition decisions. He takes his 20 years of tactical experience and combines it with his understanding of engineering, the technical constraints, and the science and technology.

Future Plans

There aren’t a lot of resources put toward helicopter capabilities, resulting in no major changes since 2004, according to Pappy.

“There are a lot of incredibly dedicated professionals who have done amazing work in the margins with very little money to make pretty decent capability improvements, but compared to the amount of money F-35s or F-18s, or even E-2s, get, we’re digging for change in NAVAIR’s couch cushions,” he says.

However, recently the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations approved a plan to modernize the helicopter, though to what extent is still unknown. The program office has tapped Pappy to write the requirements for the modernization of the MH-60R helicopter since they are now 20 years old.

Knowing that he couldn’t possibly come up with everything by himself, Pappy is working on building a coalition of willing young test pilots and colleagues in Fallon to help him nail all the requirements down, as well as make a plan for how much money to request.

“That’s going to take up the next couple of years, I think,” Pappy says. “It’s super exciting to be a part of this. There’s a ton of work to be done and I think a lot of us feel the pressure. We’re only going to get one shot at this, and we’ve got to get it right.”

In the end, he hopes the service life modernization effort he’s working on for the aircraft will provide exactly what the Fleet needs.