Meet UND’s Blue Angel
‘One of the best decisions I ever made,’ said Lt. Cmdr. Griffin Stangel on attending UND
One member of the U.S. Navy’s elite flight demonstration squadron received a homecoming of sorts last month.
That’s when UND alum Lt. Cmdr. Griffin Stangel, lead solo with the Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron — more commonly known as the Blue Angels due to the color of their Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet aircraft — returned to North Dakota to perform at the 2024 Fargo AirSho.
Returning to the state for the first time since graduating from UND in 2012, Stangel said UND’s John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences was instrumental in launching his aviation career.
“I had originally jumped back and forth between which colleges I wanted to pursue,” said Stangel. “In high school I was a big rower, so I first looked at the Naval Academy and Oregon State University. I knew I wanted to pursue aviation, so I made the decision late in the game my senior year to commit to the University of North Dakota, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.”
Stangel entered UND as a Commercial Aviation major but switched to Air Traffic Management after his freshman year. He said the program expanded his aviation knowledge while also allowing him to pursue his passion of flying.
“Through UND, I was able to get my single engine private instrument ratings and basically fly recreationally while keeping the aviation dream alive,” Stangel said.
Despite going through a period of adjusting to North Dakota’s harsh winters, Stangel reflected fondly on his time in Grand Forks.
“I grew up in Wisconsin, so I thought I knew what Midwest winters were like,” he said with a smile. “The kind of winters you experience up here are eye-opening. Wind chills well below zero for weeks at a time was not something I was used to.”
Stangel was a member of UND’s Sigma Phi Epsilon and remains in contact with some of his fraternity brothers.
“A couple of them joined the Navy, so it’s pretty cool to see the lineage follow through,” he said.
Stangel is also a “big UND hockey fan,” and says he still has the jersey he got as a student.
Three weeks after graduation, Stangel — who took his oath as a naval officer in Fargo during his senior year at UND — departed for Officer Candidate School at Naval Station Newport (R.I.). This was followed by aviation indoctrination at Naval Air Station Pensacola (Fla.), which serves as the Blue Angels’ home base.
A member of the Blue Angels since September 2021, Stangel has accumulated more than 1,855 flight hours and 190 carrier landings, according to his Blue Angels biography. He said the requirements to apply for the elite squadron — among them flying a minimum of 1,250 tactical jet hours — are arduous but rewarding.
“I was in the Navy nine years before I even applied to the team — it takes time to build up those hours,” Stangel said. “You get the opportunity to get all this deployment experience — you’re flying off aircraft carriers. It’s a very unique experience, exhilarating and challenging.”
Stangel said the level of discipline and teamwork demanded by the Blue Angels is second to none.
“It’s the best team I’ve ever been a part of,” he said. “I’ve been a part of some phenomenal teams — whether it’s sports in high school or my fraternity in college. I thought my deployment squadron back in 2016, ’17 and ’18 was the best team I’d ever be a part of, but coming here and seeing this, it’s on a next level. Everybody has the trust instilled in them to go do their job to the best extent possible, and that is the framework for being able to do what we do.
“The other part I really enjoy is traveling to every corner of the country,” Stangel added. “We go to 32 cities every year — New York, Seattle, San Diego, all over Florida, the central U.S. We go to places I would have never traveled to before, so that is by far, one of the best parts of this job.”
