Ex-Flight Lt. Graciela Tiscareño-Sato

Graciela Tiscareño-Sato. Personal photo.

Graciela quickly understood that her class-mates who travelled to Europe from their high school in northern Colorado for their holidays, had parents with university degrees. As I virtually walk with this charming, bubbly, expansive woman around her recently developed vegetable plot near San Francisco (“we've had plenty of time with lockdown” she laughs), she recounts how she and her four siblings are children of Mexican immigrants for whom further education was not part of the game-plan. But thanks to a school counsellor who mentored her to a place at the University of California at Berkeley, and the counsellor's U.S. Air Force husband who helped her earn an Air Force scholarship, Graciela, too, has travelled to Europe... and elsewhere! 

Graciela was 17 when she faced five Air Force officers who quizzed her about why she wanted to join the Air Force. “It was like testifying in Congress and they threw all sorts of questions at me,” she remembers. One in particular stuck with her: would she be a conscientious objector? “I didn't even know what that meant! Once they'd explained, I told them that I wouldn't be here if I was going to be a conscientious objector!” 

““You can’t sneak into military flight training so they knew I was as legitimate as them.””

Her mother was dubious. She'd agreed that Graciela could go to university but insisted she had to live at home. On the day two letters landed in the postbox, one with a place for her at Berkeley and the other awarding her the four-year Air Force Reserve Officer Training Programme (AFROTC)  scholarship, “my mother cried, and they were not tears of joy.” Nevertheless her parents, as proud of their daughter as they were concerned that she was “weird”,  drove her to her new life in California where she would study Environmental Design/Architecture in parallel to completing the mandatory Aerospace Studies as an AFROTC scholarship cadet.

As part of her duties Graciela spent two weeks visiting different air force bases. “Because I was studying architecture, I thought I'd end up in a civil engineering squadron. I was very disappointed to learn that they didn’t design buildings; they just maintained them and fixed pot-holes.”

But a sortie with a female pilot set her on a different path. “It was my first time ever in an aircraft and I absolutely loved it. The instructor told me I was the first person that day who hadn't thrown-up,” Graciela says delightedly. “She told me 'If you want to fly, tell the AFROTC staff you want to fly.'” So she did.

By the time Graciela completed her degree she also had a full commission from the Air Force to become an aircraft navigator. Six months later, 2nd Lt.(Chief Warrant Officer) Tiscareño began her active duty career at flight training as an Undergraduate Navigator Training (UNT) student. On UNT graduation day, she asked Genro Sato, a young Japanese man, to pin the silver wings onto her uniform. They'd met at university as trombone players in the Cal Marching Band. An hour later he asked her to marry him. “And we've been married 28 years,” she smiles.

She was the only woman in her UNT class amongst the 32 who started (and 24 who finished) at Mather Air Force Base in Sacramento. “I was never made to feel that I shouldn't be there. The other lieutenants all had gone through the same selection process. You can't sneak into military flight training so they knew I was as legitimate as them.”

Graciela at KC135R nav station. Photo credit: Jonathon Pece

Graciela then trained on the KC-135R refuelling tanker before joining the 43rd Air Refuelling Squadron at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington. Her first deployment was to Saudi Arabia, a member of one the first aircrews to patrol and enforce the No-Fly Zone in southern Iraq at the end of the Gulf War. These were designated as combat sorties because enemy fire was “probable and expected.” But at that time women were barred by U.S. legislation from combat duties so when her crew was awarded the Air Medal they almost didn't get it because she, technically, shouldn't even have been there!

During her 10-year career in the Air Force Graciela did not just refuel aircraft (her favourite to refuel is the SR-71 Blackbird which flew high-altitude missions at supersonic speeds.) She became an instructor and completed a Master's degree in International Management “and I went to Saudi Arabia almost every year,” she sighs... clearly not one of her favourite tasks!

She served at the NATO Combined Air Operation Centre in Vicenza, Italy which coordinated all Close Air Support missions in the Bosnia and Herzegovina theatres. Two year later, she led a multi-service group of communications technicians in the U.S. Embassy in Quito, Ecuador supporting counter-narcotics operations. She had become intrigued by wireless communications whilst living in Italy, researched her master thesis on the telecoms industry while in Ecuador, and decided that would be her gateway out of the military.

“I was going to be promoted to Major [Squadron Leader] but the next stop would’ve been a desk job. The Air Force wouldn't let me move anywhere else, so with my service obligation complete, I took my career into my own hands and went to work for Siemens.”

Nine years later she left to found a publishing, marketing and communications firm called Gracefully Global Group. Graciela is the author of the bestselling Captain Mama book series, the first bilingual (English/Spanish) book series to feature mothers serving in the military. She writes from a solid knowledge base: she is a mother of three. Her eldest daughter, Milagro, was born after 25 weeks of gestation weighing just 505 grammes. Blind from birth Milagro also lives with severe hearing impairment. But thanks to sophisticated hearing aid technologies she has perfect pitch and joins in the family's musical activities with piano and guitar. 

Graciela was honoured by former President Barack Obama as a Woman Military Veteran Leader Champion of Change in March 2014. She speaks to a wide variety of audiences on subjects ranging from leadership to the STEM of Aviation and has won a range of awards.