Japan Air Lines comes to Napa
I'd been teaching private-pilot and commercial-pilot ground school at night for the Solano County Community College, wishing it could be my real "day job." Western Electric was dead-ended, boring, and annoying. Well, at least it didn't pay very well.
When Japan Air Lines came to Napa County Airport and contracted International Air Service Company to build a flight crew training center, my application must have been one of the first they received. My nose had pressed up against those shiny windows many a time since they first appeared in 1971.
I was at work at some phone company central switching office, making thousands of wire-wrap connections installing a hallway of WE crossbar switches, when I was called to the supervisor's office. There, Joe Sabragia told me Donald was on the phone, calling from home. The envelope that had arrived in the mail from IASCO would say a lot. I was holding my breath adjacent a huge room full of clackity-clacking telephone equipment and constantly sounding "line fuse" alarm bells, as Donald opened the envelope and read to me, "We are pleased to welcome you..." Life had just changed for the better! They had flight simulators, well-equipped classrooms, ample training systems development monies, and a ton of potential. By the time I left them in 1978 they'd entrusted me with some staff in a new drafting room, photographic darkroom, some brand new 8080- and Z80-based development systems that I used to design and implement LED-and-graphic display panels running nominal and anomalous Falcon-20 systems simulations, tied to a line of inexpensive, interactive cockpit mockups I had created for classroom use. I had high-tech classrooms built to my specs. All the while, they kept my teaching schedule full, to generate revenue. When, late on, the IASCO CEO's son Rick Jack was handed directorship of the training division, he seemed to treat it as his personal toy. He ran it like he ran his red Ferrari, just to play. This made leaving a lot easier. |
More than once I'd stood outside the new Flight Crew Training Center, watching their flightline filling up with row after row of shiny new Piper