Dan Pedersen

Dan Pedersen is a retired United States Navy Captain, credited as being the leading force behind the creation of the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School program known as “TOPGUN”.

Military career Pedersen joined the Navy in 1953 as an enlisted mechanic. In 1955, he was accepted into the Naval Aviation Cadet Program. After completing flight training on 1 March 1957, he was assigned to VF(AW)-3 flying the Douglas F4D Skyray.

In late 1968, Pedersen joined VF-121 at NAS Miramar as a tactics instructor. The report recommended that an "Advanced Fighter Weapons School" be established at Naval Air Station Miramar under the control of VF-121 to revive and disseminate community fighter expertise throughout the fleet. The report stated that the Advanced Fighter Weapons School was to have: one Officer-in-charge (F-4 or F-8 Crusader pilot), three F-4 pilot instructors, three F-4 Radar Intercept Officer instructors, three F-8 pilot instructors and an Aviation Ordnance Officer. The school would train twenty (20) F-4 Phantom II aircrews and ten (10) F-8 Crusader Naval Aviators per year. The aircrew syllabus would consist of 25 hours per pilot/aircrew in the F-8 or F-4, 75 hours of classes and a course duration of four weeks. Following the implementation of the program, the Navy kill ratio in Vietnam went from 2.5:1 to 24:1. Trerice's father brought a lawsuit against Pedersen, Rangers executive officer and others but the case was dismissed. On 11 June 1982 he relinquished command of Ranger and became deputy chief of staff for the Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.

In 2018, one year prior to the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of TOPGUN, Pedersen was honored at Palm Springs Air Museum Gala.

In 2019, his book TOPGUN: An American Story was published to critical acclaim. In the book he warned that U.S. naval aviators weren't getting enough flight time, weren't practicing dogfighting and that an over-reliance on technology risked repeating the situation that occurred in the early years of the Vietnam War.