Lieutenant Commander Frank C. Wittwer died when his F/A-18C Hornet fighter crashed on January 18, 2006 near the Naval Air Station in El Centro. He had previously served as a pilot in Iraq for Strike Fighter Squadron 97 aboard the USS Constellation. LCDR Wittwer was a Class of 1994 United States Naval Academy graduate. He graduated with a bachelor’s in systems engineering. He later completed his MBA at California State University in 2005.

“Frank was everybody’s friend and he was always inquisitive about things,” Commander Todd Wilson recalled. “My dad had a very successful [naval] career and Frank had a thousand questions for him. Frank shared his surface Navy experience but less so because he was so excited about flying and it has become, like for a lot of us, not quite an infatuation, but a large piece of our lives.”

He is survived by his wife and their three children.

LCDR Wittwer was honored through the Travis Manion Foundation Character Does Matter program presented during the USNA’s Summer Seminar and USNA STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) Camp for rising 11th graders.