He flew MQ-9 Reapers from a control station thousands of miles from the battlefield — then came home to a war most people never saw and nobody understood.

In this episode of C-Suite Standards, Tanner Yackley (founder of Remote Warrior, U.S. Air Force veteran) breaks down what nobody talks about in remote combat: the psychological toll of fighting a war through a screen, the leadership lessons buried inside a job most people can't imagine, and the four-pillar framework we discussed to help operators process what they've carried home.

This isn't a war story. It's a leadership story — about isolation, invisible weight, and what it actually takes to lead people through experiences no manual prepares you for.

If you lead people, manage teams, or have ever carried something no one else could see — this one's for you.

🎙️ C-Suite Standards | Leadership. Unfiltered.

Jamail Larkins started with nothing in aviation. No connections. No money. No family in the industry. At 12 he was washing planes to get seat time. At 14 he petitioned the U.S. government to let him fly solo — they said no — so he went to Canada and did it anyway.

Today he's the FAA's first Ambassador for Aviation and Space Education, the founder of AviationStart, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, and the person behind over $20 million in annual aviation scholarships. He's spoken to 60,000 students about what this industry actually looks like from the inside. He testified before Congress about what the FAA's certification backlog is costing the industry. And he built a multimillion dollar aviation business from the ground up.

In Episode 1 of C-Suite Standards, we go where most aviation conversations don't — into what's actually broken in the pipeline, why the C-suite keeps treating workforce development as a tomorrow problem, and what it's going to take to build an industry that actually protects the people trying to enter it.

This is the conversation aviation has needed to have publicly for a long time.