When Col. Craig Andrle was a University of Iowa student directing cars into parking lots before Hawkeye football games to raise money for ROTC, he couldn’t have known that one day he’d be flying a fighter jet in formation over Kinnick Stadium.
Andrle, commander of the 388th Fighter Wing based at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, will lead a four-ship flyover of F-35A Lightning II’s before Saturday’s Iowa vs. Minnesota football game.
“Over the stadium will be four of the most advanced aircraft in the world today flying over the Hawks,” Andrle said in an interview with The Gazette. “It’s a great opportunity to show Americans what our Air Force can do.”
Andrle, 43, grew up on a farm in Ely, the son of Robert and Carol Andrle. He graduated from Prairie High School, where he met his wife, Becky. He went to the UI, studied computer science and joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, before graduating in 2000.
As a UI junior, Andrle applied for a spot to train as a pilot for the Air Force. Once accepted, he got his private pilot license and then went to Air Force pilot training.
Andrle completed two tours of duty in Iraq and two in Afghanistan, flying more than 1,000 combat hours in an F-16 fighter jet. He reached that milestone on March 20, 2017, while serving as commander of the 79th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron in Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan.
“One of the most memorable stories I had I was on my last deployment with Bagram,” Andrle said. “We were supporting Army Rangers on the ground in Kandahar in the fight against ISIS-K.”
Andrle and his wingman were set up with bombs to drop on buildings where terrorists named after Khorasan Province were holed up as they fired at Rangers, he said. The pilots dropped all their ordnance but the situation on the ground still was bad and air reinforcements were not yet available.
“I hustled back to Bagram, landed, got out of my jet and ran over to another jet and was back airborne in about 35 minutes,” he said. “I went back into the airspace and dropped three more bombs. It was something I’d never even heard of, using all the bombs on a jet and getting another jet and dropping off all the bombs on that jet. That was a pretty crazy day.”
In 2017, Andrle finished his time as a squadron commander and moved with his family to Washington, D.C., where he earned a master’s of science in national resource strategy from National Defense University. He then went to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he worked on strategies, plans and policies, specifically for Iran.
In June 2020, Andrle and his family moved to Utah so he could join the leadership team of the 388th Fighter Wing, where he’s responsible for the readiness, training, morale and welfare of 2,000 people who maintain and operate F-35A aircraft.
Compared with the F-16 — Andrle’s first jet — the F-35 uses stealth technology and has advanced sensors and avionics. Sensor fusion allows the aircraft to take in information from multiple inboard and offboard sources and fuse it together in an easy-to-understand display, Andrle said.
“A good comparison of the two is if F-16 is a flip phone, an F-35 is an iPhone 10,” he said. “That generational leap in technology is what sets the F-35 apart.”
He joked that when talking with UI students he wouldn’t be able to make that comparison because flip phones were before their time.
The 388th has done more than 20 flyovers so far this year, mostly at football games and patriotic events, Andrle said.
The jets fly in fingertip formation with as little as 3 feet between the tips of the wings, Andrle said. The formation is called fingertip, or finger four, because the positions of the planes mimic the tips of the four fingers of the human right hand with the “tall man” as the lead plane.
“That’s a spacing we use if we need to go through weather and don’t want to lose each other in the clouds,” he said. “It’s a formation position we fly on a fairly routine basis.”
Joining Andrle in the flyover is Lt. Col Nicholas Edwards, deputy commander of the 388th Operations Group, who graduated from the UI in 2002. Edwards was part of a Kinnick flyover in 2019.
Andrle will meet Friday with UI ROTC students. He plans to talk about his career path and encourage them to stick with the military. Recruiting into some military branches has fallen during the pandemic when in-person recruiting centers were closed and with political polarization, the Army Times reported in May.
Andrle wants college students to know not only about the exciting aspects of his job, but that he has done all this with a wife who has a career as a veterinarian and with four kids.
“Military life doesn’t exclude you from having a spouse with a professional career or having a big family,” he said. “The opportunities afforded to you in the Air Force are things I never would have thought I’d have an opportunity to do. It’s been an incredible journey thus far.”
www.thegazette.com
Andrle, commander of the 388th Fighter Wing based at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, will lead a four-ship flyover of F-35A Lightning II’s before Saturday’s Iowa vs. Minnesota football game.
“Over the stadium will be four of the most advanced aircraft in the world today flying over the Hawks,” Andrle said in an interview with The Gazette. “It’s a great opportunity to show Americans what our Air Force can do.”
Andrle, 43, grew up on a farm in Ely, the son of Robert and Carol Andrle. He graduated from Prairie High School, where he met his wife, Becky. He went to the UI, studied computer science and joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, before graduating in 2000.
As a UI junior, Andrle applied for a spot to train as a pilot for the Air Force. Once accepted, he got his private pilot license and then went to Air Force pilot training.
Andrle completed two tours of duty in Iraq and two in Afghanistan, flying more than 1,000 combat hours in an F-16 fighter jet. He reached that milestone on March 20, 2017, while serving as commander of the 79th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron in Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan.
“One of the most memorable stories I had I was on my last deployment with Bagram,” Andrle said. “We were supporting Army Rangers on the ground in Kandahar in the fight against ISIS-K.”
Andrle and his wingman were set up with bombs to drop on buildings where terrorists named after Khorasan Province were holed up as they fired at Rangers, he said. The pilots dropped all their ordnance but the situation on the ground still was bad and air reinforcements were not yet available.
“I hustled back to Bagram, landed, got out of my jet and ran over to another jet and was back airborne in about 35 minutes,” he said. “I went back into the airspace and dropped three more bombs. It was something I’d never even heard of, using all the bombs on a jet and getting another jet and dropping off all the bombs on that jet. That was a pretty crazy day.”
In 2017, Andrle finished his time as a squadron commander and moved with his family to Washington, D.C., where he earned a master’s of science in national resource strategy from National Defense University. He then went to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he worked on strategies, plans and policies, specifically for Iran.
In June 2020, Andrle and his family moved to Utah so he could join the leadership team of the 388th Fighter Wing, where he’s responsible for the readiness, training, morale and welfare of 2,000 people who maintain and operate F-35A aircraft.
Compared with the F-16 — Andrle’s first jet — the F-35 uses stealth technology and has advanced sensors and avionics. Sensor fusion allows the aircraft to take in information from multiple inboard and offboard sources and fuse it together in an easy-to-understand display, Andrle said.
“A good comparison of the two is if F-16 is a flip phone, an F-35 is an iPhone 10,” he said. “That generational leap in technology is what sets the F-35 apart.”
He joked that when talking with UI students he wouldn’t be able to make that comparison because flip phones were before their time.
The 388th has done more than 20 flyovers so far this year, mostly at football games and patriotic events, Andrle said.
The jets fly in fingertip formation with as little as 3 feet between the tips of the wings, Andrle said. The formation is called fingertip, or finger four, because the positions of the planes mimic the tips of the four fingers of the human right hand with the “tall man” as the lead plane.
“That’s a spacing we use if we need to go through weather and don’t want to lose each other in the clouds,” he said. “It’s a formation position we fly on a fairly routine basis.”
Joining Andrle in the flyover is Lt. Col Nicholas Edwards, deputy commander of the 388th Operations Group, who graduated from the UI in 2002. Edwards was part of a Kinnick flyover in 2019.
Andrle will meet Friday with UI ROTC students. He plans to talk about his career path and encourage them to stick with the military. Recruiting into some military branches has fallen during the pandemic when in-person recruiting centers were closed and with political polarization, the Army Times reported in May.
Andrle wants college students to know not only about the exciting aspects of his job, but that he has done all this with a wife who has a career as a veterinarian and with four kids.
“Military life doesn’t exclude you from having a spouse with a professional career or having a big family,” he said. “The opportunities afforded to you in the Air Force are things I never would have thought I’d have an opportunity to do. It’s been an incredible journey thus far.”
Ely native, Iowa grad will lead flyover at Kinnick
Col. Craig Andrle, commander of the 388th Fighter Wing based at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, will lead a four-ship flyover of F-35A Lightning II’s before Saturday’s Iowa vs. Minnesota football game.
www.thegazette.com
