LEADERSHIP
The Advisor
Decision Altitude Strategies is built around one principle — the people advising you should have actually made the calls you're facing.
Dan Dalton has spent his career at the intersection of technology innovation and strategy execution. Most consultants understand the industry from a distance. Dan has navigated market entry and government engagement from inside the room, closed partnerships across five continents, and transformed business models in multiple organizations.
Dan brings more than 20 years of experience across aviation commercialization, autonomous systems, and national security — credible to the C-suite, the FAA, the Pentagon, and Capitol Hill in equal measure. The span of Dan's career lets him speak the language of founders, regulators, operators, and defense officials with equal fluency.
Most recently, Dan spent six years at Wisk Aero as Vice President of Commercialization & Airline Development, where he led a 20-person international team responsible for 200% launch market growth across North America and Asia. He closed more than 40 strategic agreements and shaped Wisk's global go-to-market strategy spanning airline partnerships, infrastructure & local ecosystem development, policy, and regulatory affairs.
Before Wisk, Dan served as Executive Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Airspace Systems, a venture-backed counter-drone technology company, where he led a business model transformation from hardware to SaaS that delivered 5x revenue improvement, captured $28M in airport security sales, and drafted legislative language adopted in the 2018 FAA Reauthorization Act.
Earlier in his career, Dan spent nine years at the U.S. Department of Energy, ultimately directing the Office of Nuclear Threat Science — a $60M program addressing nuclear terrorism policy and technical challenges across four national laboratories. He began his career as a project engineer at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and also served as a Visiting Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Dan serves as a member of the Texas Aviation Advisory Committee for the Texas Department of Transportation and previously served as Chairman of the Texas Advanced Air Mobilty (AAM) Advisory Committee. He holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from UC San Diego and an M.A. in International Relations and International Economics from Johns Hopkins SAIS.
AVIATION CREDENTIALS
With nearly two decades of piloting experience, Dan holds a commercial pilot certificate with instrument and seaplane ratings, an SF50 Type Rating, and an FAA Part 107 commercial drone license. He has over 1000 flight hours in 10 different piloted aircraft platforms and has been an instructor for drone operations ground school. Dan brings firsthand understanding of airspace, certification, and operational realities — across piloted and unmanned, civil and defense.
Decision Altitude Strategies was founded on a simple premise: the most important moments in an aviation or aerospace company's life deserve an advisor who has actually made those calls before.