Jeff Langer: From fighter cockpit to campus podium

You’re high in the wild blue yonder, going about your business of learning to fly a military jet, when suddenly you goof up. At that precarious moment, what kind of instructor would you rather have in the seat behind you — a “screamer” who makes your helmet ring, or someone who can coolly talk you through it?

You’d love to have Navy Capt. Jeff Langer in that seat. He had his fill of screamers as a naval aviator-in-the-making, and he vowed never to inflict high-decibel backseat driving on students as a flight instructor himself.

In fact, he so carefully cultivated a calming, monotonal voice that now, as commanding officer of the Navy ROTC Unit at UW–Madison, he finds himself compromised in public speaking. As a transition from cockpit to podium, it’s been what you might call — dipping into that deep treasure chest of nautical metaphors — a sea change.

“No matter how hard I try,” says Langer with a smile, “I can’t get much inflection into my voice. I worked too hard before to get inflection out of my voice.” Flight controllers and other pilots told him they could never tell, because of Langer’s flat delivery, whether he was landing with four good engines or one.

There was one occasion, however, when danger hurtled at him so fast that he couldn’t utter a word. He and his very first flight student were practicing a maneuver, when the student said, “Sir, do you see that plane?”

“Oh, that one isn’t a problem,” said Langer. At that moment, another training aircraft blasted over their cockpit going the opposite direction and a tad too close for comfort — 20 feet away. Turned out the plane the student had seen coming at them was blocked from Langer’s view by the student’s head, so Langer thought he was referring to another plane he had seen in the distance.

“It got awfully quiet in our plane after that,” says Langer. “My student later told me, “Sir, you’ve got great eyes. I thought for sure that plane was going to hit us.’ What trust he had in me.”

Langer assumed the Navy ROTC command last summer, after his career took him to every continent on earth, including Antarctica. He flew to the icy continent in 1998 as the defense attache and senior U.S. military officer stationed in New Zealand.

He visited the exact South Pole, where scientific research that’s facilitated by the Navy is conducted. While he was there, Langer played parka-golf at an elevation of 10,000 feet (of ice), putting his ball round the world from yesterday to today and back again through the international dateline.

“And it only took me two strokes,” he says. “That earned me permanent bragging rights with my brother, who’s another golf nut.”

Langer was good at another game, one even more serious than golf: hunting Russian subs. From 1978 to 1981, during the height of the Cold War, he piloted a $60 million P-3 antisubmarine warfare plane, which had a crew of 13. Its mission was to keep constant track of Russian subs.

“As a junior officer, I was pitted against a senior Russian captain down in that sub,” says Langer. “We wanted to make sure that whenever a Russian sub raised its periscope, it would see one of our planes.”

He also flew a P-3 around the world — including the fat parts this time — to help map the planet’s magnetic field, measure the force of gravity, sample water temperatures and chart icebergs.

He got most of this globetrotting out of his system before meeting the French Canadian who became his wife, the former Nicole Debeau. She and their 7-year-old daughter, Sarah, have not had the usual long-tour waits that Navy families endure, because they came into Langer’s life later in his career.

His active duty began after graduating from the University of Rochester, where he was a member of the Navy ROTC unit. He thought he would get out after three or four years, but here he is, a four-striper or “Cap’n,” as he’s called in the Navy.

“It’s like a big family,” he says. “We have a common bond — a concern about each other and the United States.

“ROTC is a good last tour for me. We’re training the next generation of officers here.” And he’s maintaining the family tradition of the Navy in the unit’s building, a former auto dealership on old University Avenue near University Health Services. It contains classrooms, lounge, recreation room and even a small basketball court.

“I want students to feel comfortable here and have a feeling of camaraderie and professionalism,” says Langer. “They’ve been entrusted to the Navy and the nation by their families, so in many respects I treat them like my own sons and daughters.”

He teaches them courses on leadership and management and on ethics and leadership, as part of the Department of Naval Science curriculum. Teaching may also be in his non-Navy future. His father was a librarian who switched to teaching high school history, and that may not be far off the mark for his son.

“I’m thinking of teaching social studies in junior or senior high school,” says Langer. “I can offer those students a different perspective on the world” — and he means every continent of it.