Part of L atinas in Aviation\, a Global Festival
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Graciela Tiscareñ\;o-Sato is a graduate of the Uni versity of California at Berkeley\, School of Environmental Design\, where she earned a degree in Environmental Design/Architecture while \;comp leting the Aerospace Studies program as an AFROTC (Air Force Reserve Offic er Training Program) scholarship cadet. She was commissioned as a Distingu ish Graduate and second lieutenant atop the Campanile on the Berkeley camp us.
\nAfter Berkeley\, she joined the active duty Air Force and comp leted Undergraduate Navigator Training at Mather Air Force Base (AFB) in S acramento. 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.
\nDur ing 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 favor ite rendezvous for refueling was with the SR-71 Blackbird as it came out o f 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\, Ita ly during the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Later she led a multi-servic e group of communications technicians at the U.S. Embassy in Quito\, Ecuad or in counter-narcotics operations.
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