An Email
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 11:54:19 -0700
To: gwhitt@ix.netcom.com
From: Rod Machado <rod@rodmachado.com>
Subject: Greetings
Greetings Gene:
Just a note to tell you how much I enjoyed the aviation contribution you've
made on your web site. I was very impressed by the items I had a chance
read. You've obviously given a lot of thought to flying and teaching. Most
important, you seem to keep a very open mind, which, in my book, has always
been the signature of a wise person. I only wish that aviation had more
instructors like you who treated the subject of flying and teaching with
the importance it deserves. Hope we have a chance to meet someday.
Best,
Rod Machado
Saying;
Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can't get it wrong.
Passage from an unknown author
--"Because I fly, I laugh more than other men. I look up and see more than they, I know how clouds feel. What it's like to have the blue in my lap. To look down on birds. To feel freedom in a thing called the stick. Who but I can slice between God's billow-legs and feel them laugh and crash with his step? Who else has seen the unclimbed peaks? The rainbow's secret? The real reason birds sing? Because I fly, I envy no man on earth."
Gene Whitt's Flying Life
I have early childhood memories of airplanes starting with seeing either the Macon or Akron dirigible fly at several hundred feet directly over my home in Kansas City, MO. The next year my Mother got me a ride in a Curtis Robin and afterwards I sat in the wicker seats of a Ford Tri-Motor. From the age of ten through fourteen I lived and went to school within sight of Hamilton Field near San Francisco. From the far school yard I could watch Keystone bombers lumber into the air and later Boeing P-12s and Martin B-10s and P-26s "Peashooters".
I made models and read every airplane book and magazine I could get my hands on during my school years from 1935 through 1941. I made both solid and flying models and could identify the major warplanes of
I had occasion to fly by air from San Francisco to Miami in 1943 by commercial airlines. Since everyone was on different priority tickets, it took me two days for the trip all by DC-3. Anyone with a higher priority could kick me off the plane. Ten days later I was in Calcutta, India.
I was on Tinian Island of the Marianas when
I was soon transferred across the building to assemble a device then called a Supersonic Trainer. This was a radar bombing simulator that was able to simulate aircraft and wind effects by moving over a queen-bed sized pool of water. Beneath the water was a glass map with glass, beads and sand that were capable to reflecting crystal vibrations in the water from the map back into a radarscope. The map was one of several covering different areas of Japan. The scope pictures simulated by the Trainer were quite accurate representations of what a radar operator/bombardier, or navigator would actually see in flight over Japan. The combination of simulated aircraft movement over the map and radar presentation gave radar operators and navigators very much needed radar experience in recognition and interpretation of what they would see over Japan.
Incorporated into the APQ23 radar set near the end of the war were sine and co-sine wire-wound resistors. Linear taps could be taken from these resistors and numerical odometer read-outs could be given of slant range to a target. We now call this ability Distant Measuring Equipment. It was used to determine the bomb release point much as with the Norden Bomb Sight by using dual tracking knobs to get a bomb release point in space that corrected for track and distance to target. July/August 1945
An additional ability of the APQ-23 was to electronically offset a radar-visible site by distance and azimuth into its wire-wound trigonometric computer. This means that an APQ-23 equipped aircraft was capable of performing 'offset' bombing by a process we now call RNAV flights. It would be capable of bombing targets that were invisible to radar by 'pretending' to bomb a visible radar site a known distance and azimuth from each other. July/August 1945
When the war ended, I had to wait two months for a ship to carry me to the U.S. During these two months I spend the better part of each working day 'flying' a Link Trainer. The state of art navigation for this period consisted of the Radio Range. Using the basic gyro instruments the pilot would be able to use the ADF to home on a radio beacon that when on-course would give a constant tone. Off course would give either the coded A or N depending on which side of the course you were on. Two months of this flying meant that twenty-eight years later when I took up flying, I could fly better on instruments than by looking out over the nose.
I began G.A. flying in 1968 in the NRI Flying Club at Concord, CA and started teaching ground school in 1969 and by 1970 I was a flight instructor by popular request of my ground school students. Since then I have accumulated over 8500 instructional hours and another 2000 hours of other time.
Gene Whitt's Other Life
I departed a state teacher's college without a credential because I accused the system of wasting my time with unrealistic ‘busy work' designed to fill out a training system ill conceived to provide what was needed in the real world of teaching. Just prior to graduation I told no fewer than five of my professors that they had wasted my time. I was older than most teacher candidates due to my military service. That is where I learned how to teach. The longer you stayed in training the longer you lived. Within five years of my graduation the teacher's training program reversed itself and got prospective teachers into classrooms early on instead of too late. Many good people chained to a failed system.
I have often said that I became a schoolteacher to get even. In my mind, I could undo for those I taught the damage done by teachers who destroyed the desire of students for knowledge for its own sake. I was an unconventional classroom teacher. I never used a chair. When the state made videos of selected teachers to help set the standards for the state in the 70's, I was one of those chosen.
As an over 50 year half-life member of NEA I am finally writing a letter. Surprising, reading the letters of present day teachers to see how little has improved in teaching conditions. When I started I taught in a room with only one light bulb. In a couple of years I moved into a room that had a full skylight for a ceiling. A few things I learned from my administrator.
1. Removing a problem from your class does no good because someone will rise to fill the vacancy.
2. Pupils don't fail; teachers do
3. Don't depend on State Teacher's Retirement for your old age.
I was selected to be my school representative to the Superintendent's Council. When I carried the word that all the teachers felt that the supervisors could better be used in the classroom, I was removed. I attended college classes on the teaching of handicapped children in which I was the only one who had ever successfully done such teaching.
I changed districts twice while using the teacher association's hiring office. I refused to give my résumé the second time but demanded to know as much about the school district as they required of me. The shocked interviewer proceeded to tell me about where she lived and about the district. I was hired in her district over 41 other applicants for the same position.
It tried at two different universities to obtain a Masters based upon having school districts provide information to teachers rather than just teachers providing the information. Was turned away twice because universities were fearful of offending school districts. I was elected to State Teachers Council and made the same proposal. All of the Districts in my section were asked to provide an ‘assessment of professional opportunity' which was made available to all teachers seeking employment. The Assessment of Professional Opportunity did not survive my leaving the state council.
As the president of my local teacher's association I wrought two significant changes. First, that teacher's facilities were given a better grade of toilet paper from that given the students. Second that administrative meetings would not be held on Friday afternoons but rather on Wednesday afternoons. This kept them on the job for the full week rather than the four and a half previously served by leaving early on Friday. Everything changed back when I left office.
However, in my last term on State Council, I distributed leaflets to the 500 or so State Council members showing how administrator members of the teacher's association were manipulating the entire organization. They did this by way of seniority that gave them controlling membership of the legislative committee's submissions to the state legislature. Shortly after I left the council, administrators were no longer in the teachers association. Some years later, I was the only non-officer of my section who was asked to rise to applause when it was disbanded through a mass reorganization of the state association. Six hundred guests applauding showed that "one person can make a difference". Unintended consequences of my activities were the loss of professionalism in exchange for unionism. Would I do it again? Yes!
I left teaching the day after I was eligible for retirement. I had found that the money in my retirement fund was going down in value faster than the state and I was adding to it. Twenty-two years later I received a letter saying that I was one of twenty-three thousand teachers who had been compensated at levels below the poverty level since retirement. My retirement income was doubled so now my poverty level retirement funds cover my medical insurance and old age health care insurance.
Were it not for the rampant school-district/administrators spiking of retirement benefits, teachers could be much better off. Spiking is where favored administrators get high-paying titles in their last years to boost their retirement incomes often to double the amounts otherwise available. I have never found it done for a teacher. This administrative retirement balloon is unfairly milking the teachers and the retirement systems, but what else is new. The retirement boards at local and state levels have known about it all the time. At one time, five-percent of the administrative retirees were taking 15-percent of the funds paid out. Doubt that it's any different today.
So what else have I learned?
1. Teachers are under appreciated, under paid and under lock-step pressure
2. The inertia of the system will outlive anything human.
3. The educational system has in itself the seeds of its own destruction.
4. Anyone, who can teach, can do better financially almost anywhere.
5. Administrators will continue to Emron the teachers of the country.
6. Next month I will take part the Library of Congress' photographic oral history of
Should not the NEA/CTA do as much for the teachers of the country? It is not too late
I rebelled against the local airport administration when they tried to prohibit free-lance flight instruction. I even rebelled against the local real estate industry when they would not show or sell me a home because I was a low-income teacher.
I did have some successes. California administrators are no longer members of the teacher's association. We built an apartment instead of buying a home. We retired on its income. I won a lawsuit against the airport and free-lance instruction has been a protected right in California ever since. I fought every parking ticket I ever got. Along with some other rebels we forced California to wiggle into a new kind of crime called an 'infraction' to make parking tickets work as a money making system. I am not winning the battle against old age.
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