David Burnett was born and raised in Parker, Colorado. After a few semesters of college he decided it wasn't for him and he enlisted in the Army in 2008. He was stationed with 563rd ASB as a 15U (Chinook Helicopter repairer). After realizing his job in the regular Army wasn’t as fulfilling as he had hoped, he applied for 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment SOAR. Making it through the unit's five week selection process he began his journey as a Special Operations crew chief. He went through countless years of training and deployed with the unit five times before deciding he wasn't going to reenlist. David currently has written and published a best selling book about his time in Special Operations titled Making a Night Stalker. He also founded a company, Tac-Clamp, which is based on a quick reaction clamp he invented and patented to be used to aid soldiers on the battlefield
David Burnett- Early Days in the Army
David was a struggling college student studying aviation technology in Denver and wanted to pursue something in the rotary wing industry. He joined the army in the hopes of flying helicopters. David wasn't actually a pilot but did end up working on maintaining the CH-47 Fox model Chinook. He then transitioned over into the special operations community and was a crew chief on the MH-47 Gulf Chinook with 160th shore. David finished off his military career was with 160th and that's primarily what his new book is about. How The Book Came To BeWhile David was transitioning out of the service ran into some issues and ended up going to the VA to mitigate the issues through counseling. The counselor said to write stuff down, so at the onset this wasn't going to be a book. As he started writing things down his paragraphs turned into chapters and then the chapters manifested into about 30,000 words.
“And at that point, you know, everything was chronologically laid out and I said, well this is kind of taking on the shape of a book, so I'll just, I'll just write a book. So that was in 2014. Fast forward to the end of 2017, I finished the book December 2017 and then submitted it to the Pentagon in January 2018. And at that point I knew I was going to self publish, so I needed a, I needed funding to cover costs of cover art, formatting, editing and everything that goes into self publishing a book. So I launched a crowdfunding campaign on the kickstarter platform and a failed miserably.” - David Burnett
Raising Funds
The majority of the funds were raised from David’s instagram audience and he was able to track where the backers come from on instagram. David had built his instagram following from just around 500 to a thousand followers to 10,000 followers after the second launch.
“And that was a main contributing factor - building your audience around an idea before you actually launch the campaign. I would fathom that was largely contributed to the success of the second go around.” – David Burnett
Author and Inventor
When David got out of the army he started thinking about a time on the flight line from Afghanistan. They would have guys come on board and attempt to hang their gear weapons system from the seat rails in the Chinook. Of course that works under the flight line floodlights, but when they go to land on a target where the inside of the helicopters all blacked out, they would see guys struggling to unhook what they had just hook hooked up to the seat rails.
“So I said I'm going to invent something to where you can clamp it on the inside of the Chinook, whether it's vertical or horizontal or where however you want to annotate it and hang whatever you need to hang from it. And then have a quick release pull tab that whatever's hanging from it when you pull that tab drops whatever's hanging from it and the user can exit the aircraft. And so that was the concept, the idea and the solution to this problem.” – David Burnett
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