Latinas in Aviation: STEM at Home with Graciela Tiscareño-Sato on "Captain Mama's Surprise"

Co-presented with College Park Aviation Museum

Join Graciela Tiscareño-Sato, retired U.S. Air Force Veteran, and one of the coauthors of Latinas in Aviation. She will read her published children's book Captain Mama’s Surprise ("La Sorpresa de Capitán Mamá") and demonstrate building an airplane skeleton craft.

Part of Latinas in Aviation, a Global Festival

Graciela Tiscareño-Sato is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, School of Environmental Design, where she earned a degree in Environmental Design/Architecture while completing the Aerospace Studies program as an AFROTC (Air Force Reserve Officer Training Program) scholarship cadet. She was commissioned as a Distinguish Graduate and second lieutenant atop the Campanile on the Berkeley campus.

After Berkeley, she joined the active duty Air Force and completed Undergraduate Navigator Training at Mather Air Force Base (AFB) in Sacramento. She graduated in the top 15% of her class of 25 students as the only woman in the class. She then trained in the KC-135R refueling tanker at Castle AFB in California before reporting into the 43rd Air Refueling Squadron at Fairchild AFB in Spokane, Washington.

During her military career, Graciela lived on or visited four continents and flew for thousands of hours. As an instructor, she taught GPS systems, navigation systems and more in the classroom and in the cockpit. Her favorite rendezvous for refueling was with the SR-71 Blackbird as it came out of its high-altitude missions over the Earth at supersonic speeds. She was one of very few women that served on the NATO Battlestaff in Vicenza, Italy during the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Later she led a multi-service group of communications technicians at the U.S. Embassy in Quito, Ecuador in counter-narcotics operations.