WILLIAMSBURG — Williamsburg native Philippe Warren is serving his community and country as the U.S. Navy Blue Angels Flight Surgeon.
Warren, who earned his Bachelor of Science in biology in 2014 from the University of Virginia, had always wanted to help people. A 2010 graduate of Lafayette High School, Warren earned his commission as an Ensign in the U.S. Navy in 2014 while attending Eastern Virginia Medical School. He graduated with his MD in 2018 and received orders to Portsmouth Naval Hospital in 2019.
Falling in love with pediatric medicine, Warren served as an intern at Portsmouth Naval Hospital, where he was chosen as Pediatric Intern of the Year. In 2020, he earned his flight surgeon wings from Naval Aerospace Medical Institute.
“I went to Pensacola and was thrown into learning how to take care of pilots, what happens to the body when you go up and down in altitude and experience G-forces,” Warren said.
After completing his flight surgeon school training, Warren was stationed in Jackson, N.C., with a Marine Osprey squadron. While there, he deployed overseas to North and West Africa for humanitarian efforts. He’s also deployed to Norway and Haiti.
After hearing about the opportunity to apply to be the Blue Angels flight surgeon, Warren jumped at the chance and dove into the application process.
He officially joined the team in September 2022.
“This is a really cool opportunity out there and the Blue Angels were one of the main reasons why I joined the Navy. I grew up in Williamsburg and the OCEANA air show was always something that I knew about. Both my parents were aerospace engineers at NASA and were very involved within the aerospace community, so when I saw this opportunity was there, I thought it would be so cool to represent the Navy to the rest of the country and to be involved with the thing that really motivated me to join,” Warren said.
As flight surgeon, Warren is the primary care physician for all team pilots and support staff. He also serves as the chief safety observer during shows, where he communicates with the pilots at all times.
“I am the primary care doctor for everyone on the team. There are 150 of us total. When I’m not taking care of their medical needs, I am the safety observer. At every show, I am at the communications cart. Me and the maintenance officer will stand there and will talk with the pilots throughout the show, my job is to make sure that they are doing the show safely according to all of our safety margins,” Warren said.
Warren, call sign Padme, earned his call sign through his obsession with Star Wars. With his first paycheck from the Navy, Warren bought a full-blown stormtrooper armor set. He would often wear his stormtrooper armor while working in pediatrics. When he showed up to his Osprey squadron, he attended a meeting relating to space information and broke out the stormtrooper armor again. However, unbeknownst to him, the colonel of the base showed up at the meeting.
“I thought it would be funny to come to the meeting dressed in my stormtrooper armor. I show up to this meeting, thinking that it’s going to just be a few pilots in my squadron, some of the enlisted guys, people that I had gotten to know really well. The goal was to get a couple of laughs and then walk out. But when I walk in, a few pilots laughed, and as I turn around to leave, the base commanding officer is standing there in the doorway. I had no idea that there were going to be all these high-ranking officials at this meeting. My face turns beet-red, I took my helmet off, and the base commander says ‘son, I bet this is the reddest your face has been your whole life,'” Warren recalls.
As he was trying to leave, the base commander shut the door and made Warren stand at the front of the room in a stormtrooper pose for the duration of the meeting. His squadron remembered the antics when he came up for his call sign, and was honored with Padme.
While the Navy and the Blue Angels are super regimented and serious, Warren is proud of his position of flight surgeon.
“Being part of this team allows me to represent everyone in the Navy to everyone in the country. The Navy by its design is meant to go forward to other places across the ocean and prevent foreign adversaries from getting to our shores. Most people don’t get to see the Navy in action because if the general public is seeing the Navy do its job, that’s not good, it means that something has come here that isn’t supposed to be here,” Warren said.
Warren flies to every airshow that the Blue Angels participate in, finding himself in a new part of the country almost every weekend.
“To have the special privilege of showing people around the nation our flight demonstration and show them what our equipment and pilots can do, it’s special. I wear this blue and yellow suit whenever we go somewhere. Nobody really knows who I am personally, but what they see is the flight suit. They see who I represent and it’s a really cool opportunity to do that,” Warren said.
To get to represent Williamsburg, a community that according to Warren, poured so much into him as a youngster, means everything.
“Every day is surreal on the job. I was born and raised in Williamsburg. It is an amazing experience on this team. One of the things that happens at these air shows is that when my name is introduced, it’s ‘From Williamsburg, Virginia, Lt. Philippe Warren’ and so every show we go to, I get the opportunity to represent Williamsburg, which is so cool. I get to go all these places and truly represent my hometown everywhere I am,” Warren said.
Naval Air Station OCEANA welcomes the Blue Angels as part of the 2023 NAS OCEANA Air Show, set to take place Sept. 16-17. For more information, visit oceanaairshow.com.
