VonoTemp

Gunners Mate Charles Thomas Vono Picture me as a boy helping out in our family store, “Vono Jewelers”, on main street (7 th Street) in my hometown of Wasco, California. This was my Uncle Chuck’s store. He had bought it from my Mother around 1958, a year or two after my Dad had passed. I was pretty young, but I could sweep the floor, take out the trash, and do other simple tasks.  My Uncle was a very kind man. And he was very good at watch repair. These are not the watches you see so much of today. These are watches where you had to wind a spring daily. They had about a million tiny gears and levers and jeweled movements.  I don’t think Uncle Chuck’s brain worked like mine did. He had some kind of super mutant brain power. This was brought home to me the day I handed him a Soma Puzzle I had struggled with. This array of different shaped blocks was supposed to fit into a cube. I had practiced. So now, if I thought hard and struggled, I could solve the puzzle in about 5 or 10 m...

  Gigantic C-5 dwarfs the KC-135 tanker while in-flight refueling Hallway talk at the 349 th Air Refueling Squadron: “No, you can’t do it unless you’ve done it.”  My fellow, but more senior, pilot, Murph, was being completely sincere and truthful. We indeed were not allowed to pilot a KC-135 on a mission to refuel a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy unless we had already piloted a KC-135 on a mission to refuel a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy. “Doesn’t that severely limit our ability to in-flight refuel C-5s?” I said. “Naw,” Denied Murph. “That’s why we are all going out tonight to refuel a C-5.” Following my top philosophy given to me by a wise Viet Nam Vet, I certainly found myself in the right place that night. I definitely was not alone. The back of the KC-135 was filled with pilots who “needed to do it”. We each took turns, rotating into the left seat, as the instructor pilot cautioned us about how to hold the KC-135 steady to allow the huge C-5 to approach and hook up to our boom. Being matche...

I just returned from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics "SciTech" Conference in Kissimmee ( pronounced kiss-EM-me ). SciTech is the largest event for aerospace research, development, and technology in the world. And we did host thousands of engineers from around the world. There is nothing like getting that many smart people together in one place to talk, share themselves, and just enjoy.  This is what AIAA does. We bring aerospace engineers (some might say nerds, I can identify with that!) together. So SciTech was very exciting and very compelling for an aerospace tech nerd like me. There were technical presentations such as a hypersonic UAV Venus explorer. (It burns aluminum for fuel!) Lots of that great cutting edge aerospace tech!  But you might not expect this. We heard from top aerospace leaders on the latest in attracting talent from across every diverse element of our world to come together to solve tough technical problems. We discussed systemati...

From the cockpit, KC-135 ready for take-off Wikipedia tells us that the term “professional” comes from the french "profession libérale”, or liberal profession. After a little more internet surfing, I have concluded that these words come from the specialized knowledge base and general scholarship required of the true professional.  You “profess” a world view that you hold in common with your fellow professionals. That is, you have a certain knowledge base that makes you helpful to society. Based on their specialized knowledge, the doctor can prescribe a useful course of healing for his patients. The lawyer has the best advice for his clients. The teacher can ensure students have every chance to learn. That's all that's needed, right? No. The other term, “liberal”, seems to hark back to the time when a well-rounded, educated person would have a “liberal education”. A person would have an education that covered all subjects. That meaning seems to have drifted a bit today as d...