Atlantis Home
Featured Logs Join the Crew!

Crew Manifest
Specs/History

Crew Manifest
Specs/History

Blackthorne, Ian Douglas



Service Record

15 Aug 2360: Entered Starfleet Academy
29 May 2364: Graduated Starfleet Academy
02 Aug 2364: Graduated Starfleet Top Gun School with promotion to LtJG
10 Aug 2364: Assigned to USS Armstrong as Helm/Operations and Fighter Pilot
13 Jun 2366: Promoted to Lieutenant
30 Jan 2369: Promoted to Lt. Commander
12 Feb 2372: Promoted to Commander and assigned to USS Yeager as XO
16 Mar 2375: Promoted to Captain and CO of USS Yeager
07 Sep 2377: Transferred to Starfleet Aerospace R&D, Earth
26 Jul 2378: Promoted to Commodore
01 Jan 2380: Promoted to Rear Admiral
13 May 2382: Promoted to Vice Admiral and assigned to USS Atlantis as CO and Commander, Third Fleet
20 Apr 2395: Presumed killed in action due to explosion of the shuttlecraft Naiad
28 Dec 2395: Reinstated to active duty following rescue and medical evaluation
14 Jun 2396: Promoted to Admiral and appointed Director of Starfleet Operations
06 Jun 2401: Appointed Starfleet Commander-in-Chief

Family and Personal History

Spouse: T’Kirr (29 Dec 2389)
Immediate Living Relatives:
Mother: Jaina Blackthorne, Ambassador, b.2320
Half-Sister: Anastasia Stecker, Free Fleets, b.2377
Son: Ross Liam Blackthorne, Starfleet Engineering, b.2376
Daughter: Kirsten Blackthorne, b.2397

Son of a career Starfleet officer and an ambassador, Ian Blackthorne spent the majority of his childhood on the move. Ian grew up primarily in the care of his mother; he was shuttled between her various diplomatic postings, living on several planets in the process. Occasionally, his father’s ship would be assigned to transport his mother to her next post, or a vacation or shoreleave would re-unite the family, but the fact that Ian was raised mostly by his mother is evident in his self-identification as Betazoid, rather than Human.

Initially fascinated by watching birds, Ian’s interest in flight quickly surfaced as he grew. At age six he broke his right leg from jumping off the roof of his mother’s house on Betazed while trying to use a bedsheet as a parachute. Leisure time was spent in any available holodeck playing with flight simulators, starting out with aircraft and then moving into space. From about age ten onward, Ian also began trying to build air and spacecraft in the holodeck, with greater success as he approached adulthood. At age eighteen, he was accepted into Starfleet Academy’s engineering and flight training program.

While in San Francisco, after the succession of girlfriends typical of fighter jocks, Ian married Elizabeth Walker during his senior year. Elizabeth was a civilian student of geology at USF, and although she was hesitant about becoming a Starfleet wife, the young couple vowed to make their marriage work. After graduating with honors, Ian attended Starfleet Top Gun School and placed first in his class, earning the prize of an immediate promotion to Lieutenant JG.

Ian was assigned to the USS Armstrong as Helm/Operations and fighter pilot, serving with distinction there for eight years. He would visit Elizabeth at every chance, but as time passed, the stress caused by the distance involved in their relationship became increasingly apparent. Upon his promotion to Commander, he was assigned as Executive Officer of the USS Yeager and Commander, Air Group of the 76th Fighter Wing. After three years of continued meritorious service, Ian was promoted to Captain and Commanding Officer of the Yeager after her previous CO retired.

Although he finally had his own command, Ian’s marriage to Elizabeth was enduring incredible strain. Having achieved what he had set out to do in Starfleet, Ian agreed to retire and move to Earth to settle into a civilian life with his wife. Unfortunately, before he could do so, the Dominion War broke out, and Ian felt that he could not abandon his duty to the Federation. Elizabeth did not agree, and the two were divorced after twelve years of marriage.

Ian continued to command the Yeager during the war until his father was killed aboard the USS Atlantis while on a mission to recover a captured Galaxy-Class starship. Stricken, Ian stepped down from his command and transferred to Starfleet R&D on Earth, taking the lead on a project to design a new space superiority fighter. His engineering and piloting background came together in the new Mustang fighter, the visionary design specifications winning him a promotion to Commodore.

Over the next few years, the Mustang project continued toward implementation, and once the prototype exceeded expectations, Ian was promoted to Rear Admiral. He continued to refine the design even further while still in the allotted timetable, and the fighter went into production two years later. When Admiral A.C. Zuriyev was promoted to Director of Alpha Quadrant Operations, the command of Third Fleet’s flagship USS Atlantis came available.

Considering that Atlantis was his father’s ship, and that it would give him a chance to personally oversee the deployment of the new Mustang fighters while putting him back in the center seat, Ian applied for the position. He not only got the job, but also received a promotion to Vice Admiral for the success of the Mustang project as he assumed command of the Atlantis and Third Fleet.

Six months into the assignment, Blackthorne’s command of Third Fleet would be put to the test when first contact was made with a race from intergalactic space only known as the Crystalline. Unfortunately, that encounter escalated into full scale war, ultimately resulting in the total loss of Starbase 16 and the destruction of several starships. Following a climactic battle at Starbase 22 where Third Fleet deployed countermeasures against the Crystalline regenerative abilities developed by the Atlantis crew, peace was attained when Atlantis escorted a hybrid life form created from the regenerative effect to the Crystalline homeworld.

A few years later, Elizabeth abruptly returned to Ian’s life, to give him the news that she had been pregnant at the time of their divorce. Ian had a child named Ross Liam, and the knowledge that she had kept this from him for nine years was not received well. Still, he vowed to do right by his son, and arranged to meet him on Atlantis’s next return to Earth. Before that could happen, Elizabeth and Liam were abducted by agents working for the Orion Syndicate, presumably to personally strike at Ian.

Fortunately, the two were rescued by independent mercenaries and delivered safely to the Atlantis before Starfleet could respond. While waiting for news of the fate of Ian’s ex-wife and son, the Atlantis discovered the derelict Daedalus-class USS Horizon, missing for over two hundred years. Upon their return to Earth, Ian oversaw the donation of the Horizon, historically notable as one of the first warp-seven capable starships and now the only surviving ship of its class, to the Smithsonian Institution.

Since this incident, Ian has striven to contact his son regularly and visit as often as his duty has allowed. In late 2386, a burgeoning romance between Ian and his then Chief of Science, T’Kirr, finally came to fruition after over a year of rising tension that grew from years of service and shared ordeals. During the next two years, T’Kirr became Atlantis’s Executive Officer, and the couple found their working relationship tested. Nevertheless, they managed to form an effective, cohesive command team while maintaining their personal dedication to one another. On New Year’s Eve in 2388, Ian and T’Kirr announced their engagement at a festive party on the promenade of Starbase Vinland, and a year later, they were married in the ship’s botanical garden.

In early 2395, both Vice Admiral Blackthorne and Captain T’Kirr were declared deceased following their apparent deaths in the destruction of shuttlecraft Naiad during a routine landing approach. The explosion in which they had apparently perished had been expertly staged to cover their abduction, interrogation, and imprisonment by a covert organization known as Section 31 in its bid to gain control of Starfleet. For several weeks after their abduction, Blackthorne and T’Kirr were telepathically interrogated, with every single bit of information relevant to Starfleet forcibly extracted from their minds. Their subsequent release into exile was Section 31’s idea of a reward for their years of service, in lieu of execution.

With a command vacuum created by their ostensible deaths, Starfleet Command promoted Commander Kathryn Harper, Atlantis’s longtime CAG, to captain and commanding officer. Captain Harper was eventually contacted by an informant with credible information that, contrary to official records, Vice Admiral Blackthorne and Captain T’Kirr were alive and being held as prisoners in exile on a primitive world. Captain Harper and her crew proceeded to follow the trail of their abducted commanding officers, even raiding the Section 31 facility where they had been held in an ultimately successful effort to determine their location. After their rescue, Captain Harper returned command of Atlantis to Vice Admiral Blackthorne, having set in motion the end of Section 31’s attempted hostile takeover of the Federation..

In mid-2396, the Section 31 Crisis was resolved with the exposure and immediate dissolution of that organization after a coalition led by Blackthorne forced the President to allow the Federation Council to consider the evidence that they had gathered against Section 31. Blackthorne and the rest of the Atlantis crew were granted presidential immunity from prosecution for the justified but unlawful actions necessary to facilitate that outcome, and were also commended as heroes by the Federation Council, as were their allies. Vice Admiral Blackthorne accepted a promotion to full Admiral and Director of Starfleet Operations, and Captain T’Kirr accepted a promotion to Commodore and Assistant Director of Starfleet Operations. The couple now makes their home in a house on the beach on the southern tip of Baja California.

Medical History

Medical Addendum, Stardate 10807.22: Blackthorne was medically disqualified from combat flight status due to a recurrence of night-blindness that was originally surgically corrected at age eighteen. His near vision was also corrected via lens implants. — Dr. Roxanne Carre, CMO, USS Atlantis

Additional Information

Once described as a man that “doesn’t tolerate anything secondhand” by a colleague, Ian Blackthorne enjoys relaxing with the finer things in life; his favorite vices are Cuban cigars, English gin, and single-malt scotch. In what little spare time his position affords him, Ian flies vintage aircraft in the holodeck, his favorites being a Grumman seaplane created as a gift from several members of his crew, and a Stearman biplane. It is also rumored that he shoots a particularly vicious game of pool.

While in command, Ian has shown an almost unrealistically idealistic willingness to go to extraordinary lengths to advance the greater good, or at least his perception of it. A notable example of this was the efforts of the Atlantis crew to stop the war with the Machen Bren, by using a stolen cloaking device to go deep into their territory and incite rebellion against their corrupt leadership. Despite being captured, imprisoned, and losing control of his ship, Ian successfully convinced the Machen Bren system lords to form a united front in opposition to the Orion backed monarchy, thereby bringing the war against the Federation to a close. Hailed as a hero upon his return to Earth, Ian declined promotion to full Admiral, stating that he “had all the rank he needed.”

Blackthorne’s spearheading of the resolution of the Section 31 Crisis serves as another example of his idealism; Ian formed a coalition of Starfleet, Klingon, and Free Fleets vessels to show enough force that Section 31 could not answer without starting an all-out civil war, thus ensuring that the Federation Council would be able to consider the matter without interference. This time, he could no longer in good conscience decline promotion, given the lack of trustworthy leadership remaining in Starfleet Command, so he accepted the job of Director of Starfleet Operations as a chance to ensure the values of the Federation would continue to be upheld.

Ian has occasionally run afoul of his superiors by failing to pay regulations that he considers to be pointless the respect they deserve. The most recent example of this was a formal disciplinary action placed on file for repeated failure to obey the thrusters-only rule inside a spacedock while he was at Atlantis‘s helm. Blackthorne considers the rule a crutch for incompetent pilots, and responded that there were no injuries or damages incurred during his impulse powered arrivals and departures. It could be said that such smug confidence in his own abilities is evidence of an overly inflated ego, a character flaw that has gotten Ian in trouble on occasion.

Further disciplinary actions are on file, but require clearance of Commodore rank or above.

Admiral Blackthorne’s career aboard the Atlantis was a long and successful one, and following the resolution of the Section 31 Crisis, he was promoted to Director of Starfleet Operations in San Francisco. Five years later, following the retirement of Fleet Admiral Zuriyev, Blackthorne replaced him as Starfleet Commander-in-Chief. He and T’Kirr now make their home in a house on the beach on the southern tip of Baja California with their young daughter, Kirsten, but have not lost their connection with Atlantis; as the CO of a flagship, Commodore Harper reports directly to Vice Admiral T’Kirr and Admiral Blackthorne.

Older Newer