Lt. Col. Dana McLaughlin has been named the next Hawaii Wing commander, marking a new phase in a Civil Air Patrol journey that began more than 30 years when she was a cadet.
McLaughlin is a licensed pilot and a retired paramedic with an extensive background in search and rescue. Her previous experience includes wilderness tracking, avalanche response, rope rescue, K9 search specialist, team paramedic, and disaster response across a half-dozen agencies. She has participated in hundreds of search and rescue missions and has served as a forensic expert witness in several homicide trials.
As a 16-year-old cadet, she supported radio operations while assisting in the recovery of a downed CAP flight crew.
She has held dozens of operational roles in CAP and is an Incident Commander Level 1. She deployed to Florida with the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the response to Hurricane Ivan in 2004, participated in the search for aviator Steve Fossett in 2007, served as incident commander for overflights during the Mauna Loa East Rift Zone eruption in 2018, and ran multi-operational periods for the Lahaina Fires in 2023.
Outside Civil Air Patrol, McLaughlin is the founder and executive director of the Hawai‘i Keiki Museum, dedicated to inspiring curiosity and promoting innovation on Moku o Keawe (Hawai‘i Island). From coral reef ecology to volcanology to astronomy, children and their caregivers discover island science through locally grounded hands-on science, technology, engineering, art, and math experiences that connect them to the natural world in ways they recognize from living on the island.
McLaughlin holds both undergraduate and master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she conducted groundbreaking research in wearable computing and affective robotics at the MIT Media Lab. She also holds a master’s in entrepreneurship from San Jose State University.
Her professional career includes senior engineering and leadership roles at Apple, Yahoo!, and The Walt Disney Co. At Apple, she led cross-functional teams in the development and launch of the original AirPods.
She is married and has two sons who look forward to joining CAP when they’re old enough._____Maj. Maryan Tooker Director of Public AffairsPacific Region
