Bluff Park native recounts 4 years as pilot for President Trump, Vice President Pence
As a boy growing up in Hoover’s Bluff Park community, Ross Sanders spent a lot of time in the woods on Shades Mountain, hunting and dreaming about life.
Little did he know that later in life, he would fly over that same mountain and his boyhood home as a pilot in one of the helicopters used to fly the president of the United States.
Sanders, a 39-year-old major in the U.S. Marines, spent the past four years as a pilot in the Marine Corps HMX-1 squadron, which provides helicopter transportation for the president, vice president, Cabinet members and foreign heads of state, including the pope.
Sanders had the opportunity to serve as the pilot for President Donald Trump about a dozen times and for Vice President Mike Pence about 20 times. Other passengers included First Lady Melania Trump, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Chief of Staff John Kelly, retired Adm. Ronny Jackson (Trump’s doctor), White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and billionaire businessman Robert Kraft (owner of the New England Patriots).
Sanders spent most of the first two years in the squadron in the group that served the president and most of the last two years serving the vice president, he said.
As a “presidential command pilot,” he was qualified to go overseas with the president. He got to fly with the president (but not pilot) when Trump went to India in February 2020 and also when Trump met North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un for a two-day summit in Vietnam in February 2019.
“There were lots of eye-opening experiences,” Sanders said of the trip to India. “That has to be the most exotic place I’ve ever seen.”
He also won’t forget the 10-day trip to Vietnam. Not only was it a historic meeting, but he also didn’t see the sun shine the whole time he was there because of all the pollution in the air, he said.
Sanders also got to come with the president when he came to Alabama for the Crimson Tide football team’s game against LSU in November 2019. He didn’t fly the president on that trip, but he did travel with him and flew the helicopter from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa in case the president needed it while he was there, he said. That’s when his helicopter route took him over his childhood home, where his mother and stepfather, Melissa and Mark Globetti, live.
MEMORABLE MOMENTS
Most of the flights in which he served as the president’s pilot were routine flights from Washington, D.C., to various places, he said. He would pick up and drop off the president on the South Lawn, taking him to and from his home at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, or another home in Florida, he said. He also flew the president on trips to Camp David in Maryland.
Sanders said he didn’t get to spend a lot of time with Trump or have any deep conversations with him, but there was a lot of small talk and brief encounters, which he still considered a “very big honor” to be in the presence of and serving the president of the United States.
“He was always friendly and in a good mood — upbeat,” Sanders said.
He particularly fondly remembers the president spending time talking with him and other Marines about a Floyd Mayweather boxing match. “He had his fighter he was pushing for,” Sanders said. “It was a very down-to-earth moment at Camp David.”
He flew the president to rallies in a lot of small towns across America and took the president and U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-California, to survey damage from California wildfires in 2018.
“It was memorable because of flying through all the smoke,” Sanders said. “You really can’t believe how dense the smoke was — that we did the whole flight on instruments. ... No sun getting through. Planned from start to finish. It was really awesomethe amount of professionalism that went into doing that so that our leaders could survey what happened in order to make decisions.”
His job took him to New York City a lot over the past three summers. He had never been to New York City before in his life, and his family got to come up from Virginia and visit with him while he was there, he said.
One time when he took the president to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, he was waiting on the president to come out when Barron Trump, the president’s youngest son, walked out with a young friend who was probably about 4 years old.
“The little boy was in love with the helicopter and wanted to see inside,” Sanders said. “Without warning, this 4-year-old goes up the steps and is looking around. The other pilot and I show him where the president sits, and he just loves it. He loves it so much that he didn’t want to get off.”
The boy was in his bathing suit and wouldn’t budge, Sanders said.
“So Barron goes on board to try and get him off; no luck. The little kid is running around the helo with Barron and Secret service in tow. It was pretty funny. So, the Secret Service got his mother (I love those guys, total pros) to come out and get her son. We got a good picture for them in front of the aircraft before we started engines for the president.”
Sanders’ wife, Megan, won the squadron’s Christmas card contest and got to present it to the First Lady in person, Sanders said.
“That, too, was so awesome,” he said. “She was so gracious. And then the White House Christmas Party — that, too, is one of the most historical events I got to partake in — to get to see the White House library. They served eggnog based on George Washington’s recipe! Francis Scott Key’s sword is on the wall! It’s pure Americana. Would make any American proud.”
Sanders’ children also got to go to the White House for Halloween. “They got to trick-or-treat and get candy from the president and from Melania,” he said. “They got to see one of the magnolia trees Andrew Jackson planted in 1832.”
Little things like that made the experience more special, he said. Sanders said he really enjoyed flying Pence because he was so personal.
“He loved to talk about his family, and he is so proud of his son, who is a Marine and an aviator, and he would talk about flying, or talk about football games or basketball games,” Sanders said. “He is just really down to Earth and loved to meet the Marines flying him.”
PAST AND PRESENT
Sanders’ time with the HMX-1 squadron ended in October. He now is the executive officer for a squadron at Joint Base Andrews in Prince George’s County, Maryland, but the experience of flying with HMX-1 was a blast, he said.
“The whole four years were amazing, from the time I got there til the time I left,” he said. “I enjoyed every trip I did.”
He likes history a lot, and getting to fly low through Washington, D.C., in a helicopter was great, he said. “You get an up-close view of all the monuments, and when the cherry blossoms are in bloom, you get a great view of them,” he said. “The natural beauty of the entire Potomac is great.”
Sanders said many of the pilots with whom he flew always wanted to be a pilot and fly a presidential helicopter, but his dream was never that specific.
“All I ever wanted to do was be a Marine,” he said.
He dreamed of being a Marine as a kid but started out as an education major at the University of Alabama. Then after 9/11, he felt an obligation to serve his country and talked to a recruiter. He intended to be a ground soldier, but the recruiter said they really needed pilots. He had never flown an aircraft before, but he went to flight school and earned his wings.
He spent four years at a Marine Corps air station in Cherry Point, N.C., then was deployed to a boat squadron in the Far East. He served six months on the USS Essex assault ship.
He then spent three years as an air officerat Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, helping coordinate support for infantry and artillery units. He was deployed to Kuwait, where a helicopter in which he was a passenger crashed, hitting the back of the ship and plunging into the Gulf of Aden upside down, he said. Those aboard were briefly trapped, but everyone survived. “It was kind of a miracle,” Sanders said.
Sanders then spent about a year back in Cherry Point before being selected for HMX-1.
CAPABLE LEADER
A lieutenant colonel who was Sanders’ supervisor at HMX-1 said members of the squadron are all handpicked. Sanders is a very good pilot, he said.
In addition to his pilot duties, Sanders at times served as a quality assurance officer, making sure his aircraft was well maintained, the supervisor said. He also was a command pilot, in charge of a certain number of Marines and was a responsible, solid leader, the supervisor said.
The job carries a lot of stress, and Sanders handled it well, the supervisor said. The pilots are away from home quite a bit, and Sanders was very good at juggling his work and home responsibilities, he said.
Sanders and his wife have been married 121/2 years and have six children — ages 11, 9, 7, 5, 3 and 1 — four girls and two boys.
Sanders said you can’t find a better set of pilots than those at HMX-1 in terms of talent and work ethic. “It’s just amazing how smoothly things go when you have a lot of confident pilots working together,” he said.
However, while they are confident, they are not cocky, he said. They’re down to Earth and humble, he said.
FAMILY AND FAITH
As thankful as he is for the experience of serving the Marine Corps and the country’s highest-ranking leaders, Sanders said he’s really not that career-minded.
“I consider myself more of a family-minded person,” he said. “I’m more proud of my marriage and my kids.”
Mary Jane Dorn was Sanders’ seventh-grade and eighth-grade math and religion teacher at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic School in Homewood and said she is not surprised that Sanders has been successful in life.
“He was a good kid, just a normal kid,” said Dorn, who is now the school’s principal. “He was very well raised, a very well-liked young man. He was always very faith-filled. His faith was always very important to him.”
While she never specifically envisioned him as someone who would pilot a presidential helicopter, she’s not surprised he could do it.
“He was really a determined young man,” she said. “When he set his mind to doing things, he would do them with loyalty and dedication. I can see why he was very successful at what he did.”
Now, she has a picture of Sanders hanging in her principal’s office that shows him in the cockpit of one of the presidential helicopters as Trump is getting off. “We’re just so proud,” she said.
Sanders now has been in the Marines for 151/2 years and said he plans to stay as long as they’ll let him. He wants to continue serving at least until he is eligible to retire with 20 years, he said. After that, he may try to become a pilot for an airline, but if that’s not an option, he would like to go into education with Catholic schools, he said.
Sanders, though he now lives in Virginia, said he treasures his time growing up in Hoover and Homewood, which he called two of the best-kept secrets in Alabama.
He still fondly remembers spending time in the outdoors with his brothers and doing things on Shades Mountain. A fan of poetry, he even wrote a poem about what it was like growing up on the mountain. The poem, called “Long View Cottage,” was scheduled to be published online by the Society of Classical Poets in late January.
He wrote another poem called “On Bluffs That Rise Up Steep,” which talks about how people tend to avoid challenges in life, but how he believes people are at their best when they’re working to overcome them.
Editor's note: This story was updated at 5:12 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 29, to correct the name of the country over which Kim Jong-Un is supreme leader. It is North Korea.