Dianna Vaccarella

Good morning fellow ECAHF’ers.  If you were not informed, or if informed but didn’t look closely, you might mistake the Piasecki (and then the Vertol) H-21 Shawnee pictured below as the CH-46 Sea Knight flown by our esteemed ECAHF chairman, Major General (USMC, retired) Tom Braaten. In fact, they’re so similar in appearance that I […]

Good Friday morning fellow ECAHF’ers.  Today. Eighty-three years ago in 1941. The day before “a date which will live in infamy”. We Americans like to think of ourselves as a people who don’t start wars, but we sure as hell can finish them. Some historians might disagree with that premise of Americans being a people

Students’ ‘homemade’ rocket soars faster and farther into space than any other amateur spacecraft — smashing 20-year records Good Saturday morning fellow ECAHF’ers.  Wow.  If only.  But alas, we kids were true amateurs and could only dream.  We launched bottle rockets from pop bottles before we turned the scorched bottles in at the local drug

Good morning fellow ECAHF’ers.  As an “early bird”, I’m up before light (it’s 5:45am as I type this—early get-ups were “beat” into me by the Marines).  And like most of you, I’m sure, I’m always in bed after dark, especially these days of “fall back”, Eastern Standard Time.  And we still have over a month

Good Sunday afternoon fellow ECAHF’ers. This aviation history vignette is less about history than it is about “current operations”.  And it’s a story not about me although I was a bit player in it, emphasis on the word “bit”.  So, I hope by telling it I don’t come off as “tooting my own horn” because

Good morning fellow ECAHF’ers. Ever jump out of an airplane while parachuting or skydiving?  Some of us jump for sport or a one-time, “bucket-list” thrill.  Military parachutists (those graduating from a military “jump school”) often claim they have voluntarily jumped out of “perfectly good airplanes”. The US Army’s jump school at Fort Moore (formally Fort

I love serendipity.  And it… “serendipity”, or chance, Providence, fate, fortune, Karma, whatever you want to call it…happens often to most of us during our lives (if we recognize it).  And it happened again to me today. This time, serendipity exposed itself as we flew home from the kitschy “UFO Capital of the World” on

Good morning fellow ECAHF’ers.  All of us older than 29 or 30 years old remember exactly where we were and what we were doing on this day 23 years ago.  I was on active duty in the Marines and flying a Beechcraft KingAir simulator at McConnell AFB in Wichita, Kansas at the moment the first

Good morning fellow ECAHF’ers.  Most of us fly.  Well, at least most of us fly for business or pleasure on commercial airliners.  But few of us have been inside an Air Traffic Control (ATC) airport control tower or in an enroute ATC facility controlling flight operations.  What happens in these facilities is not “controlled chaos”