From classroom to cockpit: MISD Cadets take off on military flight
MIDLAND, Texas (KMID/KPEJ)- A group of Midland ISD Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (AFJROTC) cadets got a hands-on lesson in military aviation this week, and it all started with a walk across the flight line.
During a visit to Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, cadets boarded a Lockheed C-130J Super Hercules aircraft, bringing their classroom lessons on aerospace science and military operations to life.
Video from the trip shows cadets walking in formation toward the plane before taking flight, an experience their instructors say is key to preparing them for future success. You may watch that video in the player above.
'This visit to Dyess AFB reinforced everything our cadets have been learning in the classroom,' said Chief Master Sergeant Jeff Deynzer, MISD AFJROTC instructor. 'It is experiences like these that truly inspire our cadets and enforces them to be military ready upon graduation.'
AFJROTC is a U.S. Air Force-sponsored program offered to MISD students in grades 9 through 12. The program blends academic instruction with leadership training, personal development, and a student-led organizational structure that mirrors real-world military principles.
Cadets in the program can also apply for several scholarship opportunities, including the J-100 Character-in-Leadership Scholarship, the Flight Academy Scholarship for earning a private pilot's license, and the Cyber Academy Scholarship, which provides college-level credits in cyber education.
MISD officials said programs like AFJROTC align with the district's goal of ensuring every student graduates from college, career, or military ready.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Chicago Tribune
2 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
Elgin News Digest: Hanover Township launches respite program for caregivers; Elgin police doing walk-and-talks on fireworks fines, safety
Hanover Township has launched a respite program for local caregivers through its Caregiver Resource Center. Using $20,724 in funding from the nonprofit AgeOptions, the township can connect caregivers with such services as in-home day relief, in-home overnight assistance and out-of-home care, according to a news release. 'Respite services provide assistance to caregivers to prevent burnout and offer an opportunity to recharge and rest,' township Supervisor Brian McGuire said in the release. Respite services are available for anyone caring for a township resident who is at least 60 years old or has Alzheimer's disease or dementia. Parents over 55, grandparents or a caregiver who is 60 or older caring for a township youth with severe disabilities can also apply as can caregivers who are 60 or older and providing care to someone with a severe disability between the ages of 19 and 59, the release said. To schedule an intake appointment, call 630-483-5660. Elgin police officers are conducting fireworks walk-and-talks in areas of the city with high numbers of fireworks-related complaints. The outreach efforts will continue over the next few weeks as a way to share safety information about the dangers and consequences of illegal fireworks, according to an Elgin Police Department social media post. Setting off fireworks in the city carries a minimum fine of $150 for a first offense and goes as high as $1,500 after a fourth offense in a 12-month period, according to city ordinances. To make a fireworks complaint, call 847-289-2700 or fill out the online fireworks complaint form at Greenheart Exchange, a 40-year-old nonprofit international student exchange program, is seeking families in and around East Dundee willing to house students from China July 27 through Aug. 10. Tammy Zilinski, area coordinator for Green Exchange, said 14 high school students with J-1 visas and a male adult chaperone will be coming to the area for a two-week immersive language and culture program at Fox Valley Baptist Church in East Dundee, where her husband, Phil, is pastor. Housing is still needed for more than half of the students and for the chaperone, Zilinski said. 'A host family will need to make sure that their student is at Fox Valley Baptist for language camp from about 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day,' she said. 'We are happy to help with carpooling if we find groups of families in one area.' Host families will provide three meals a day and a suitable place to sleep, which can be a room shared with another child of the same gender and close in age. A background check is required as part of the application, which can be found at For more information, call Zilinski at 847-489-8426. Symond-Madison Funeral Home in Elgin is raising money to cover the cost of installing a grave marker for Cpl. Eriverto Ortiz, a Korean War vet buried at Bluff City Cemetery. Ortiz was killed in combat in September 1950, but his remains could not be recovered at the time. They were positively identified in 2023 and returned to his family in October 2024 for burial in Elgin. The U.S. government is providing the grave marker free of charge but does not pay the $3,000 installation expense, which includes a permit fee and marker foundation, according to the post about the fundraising effort. To make a contribution, go to
Boston Globe
4 days ago
- Boston Globe
I was changed forever by a journey to the bottom of the sea
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Just before my 2023 dive, Karl Stanley, the captain who took me down off the Honduran coast, told me that he had eschewed communication systems for his sub, believing that if something went wrong at the depths to which we were to dive, no one would be able to find and get to us, let alone save us. Stanley operates out of Honduras in part because his sub doesn't have to undergo a rigorous licensing and insuring process there. At the powerful whimsy of the encompassing brine, the best-case scenario if something went wrong would be for the sub to quickly tumble to its crush point — the depth at which the pressure crumples the craft. Where does wonder — if excessively chased — bump up against tragedy, or atrocity? Years ago, Stanley tested his own limits, pushing his first sub, C-Bug, beyond its operating depth rating, risking implosion, permanently deforming its hull. He narrowly escaped with his life. I've spoken to many in the amateur submersible community. Some admit to actually enduring time on the surface, as if it's painful for them — a too-bright way station. To some, the underwater realm serves as a convent or monastery. A place to be human away from the rhythms and strictures of the human world. A place where our sense of control is tenuous and often illusory. A place where we may feel that we don't have to comport with the rules of the surface. It's also a place where we shouldn't be, a place our bodies weren't made for, wherein we require machines in order to respire. 'It's really hard when you're down there to want to come back to the surface,' says the amateur submersible builder Shanee Stopnitzky, who has spent over a year of her life in aggregate underwater. 'This [the deep sea] is my place.' 'Definitely, in the beginning, it was almost like an addiction,' Tonni Andersen, a scuba and submersible diver, told me. 'I almost need to dive.' Many in the community seem to downplay the dangers of their avocation. They often get lost in the exhaustive safety precautions they must take to mitigate — but never eradicate — the danger. Because they're taking these precautions and lending their minds and bodies to inventing and engineering and then physically welding and sealing and gluing and fire-treating the parts for these safety measures, that's what many of them fixate on. The safety precautions are what take up their time and energy, and sometimes, if only rhetorically, many seem to confuse that for actual encompassing safety, actual encompassing security, when, in reality, the encompassing thing is the danger — the fickleness and power of the deep sea. I've probably watched too many Bond movies and can't help thinking of the dark side of chasing this exploratory impulse. It feels short-sighted and sometimes villainous. Could this be another version of misguided human stewardship and manifest destiny, akin perhaps to colonizing Mars? Should we occupy this space just because our technology and desires tell us that we can? What might be the consequences of such projects, and who may use underwater technology in the future for less benign and whimsical means? 'The future of mankind is under water,' Stockton Rush, OceanGate's late CEO (and one of the five who perished onboard Titan), once said. 'We will have a base under water…. If we trash this planet, the best lifeboat for mankind is under water.' One may wonder if by 'we,' he meant the uber-wealthy, and if by 'mankind,' he also meant the uber-wealthy. I do not regret having dived to 2,000 feet in Stanley's home-built submersible. What I beheld was indeed wondrous, but in a torturing kind of way. I think about it every day, and so, from time to time, I get lost, foggy, as if still down there with the bioluminescence. Though I will never do that again, I can see how it could become an addiction. I will attempt to satisfy the urge instead by putting on my shoes and going for a walk on the good, hard surface of the earth, watching the birds, praying that all who need to be rescued will be. I will do this, until it becomes enough.
New York Times
5 days ago
- New York Times
Torn Between Artifice and Authenticity
This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page. I was born in Saigon in 1960, and I experienced the war in Vietnam firsthand. When the war ended and Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, the U.S. government evacuated me and my family in a C-130 cargo plane. We ended up in California. Now, 50 years later, I work as a landscape photographer, viewing my medium not only as a tool for witnessing past and present conflicts, but also as a space suited for contending with the paradoxes that define history itself. One particularly pivotal experience shaped my approach. It began in 1999, when I contacted a group of war re-enactors based in North Carolina and Virginia. I worked with and photographed them over several summers, and the images eventually became a series titled 'Small Wars.' This small group of young, conservative men was dedicated to recreating key U.S. military operations and battles from the war in Vietnam on one member's 100-acre wooded property. Among them were a product manager at Thomson Financial, a former National Guard driver, a mortician and a carpenter. Too young to have served in the conflict, none of these men had ever experienced real combat. Yet they were obsessively committed to the authenticity of their 'impressions' — meticulous in their attention to equipment, clothing, food and supplies, whether portraying the Vietcong, the North Vietnamese Army or American soldiers. Participation was by invitation only. To engage with multiple perspectives, I alternated between the role of a Vietcong fighter and that of a Kit Carson Scout — an N.V.A. soldier who defected to assist the Americans. Armed with an AK-47 loaded with Hollywood blanks, and clad in either Vietnamese-made black pajamas or an N.V.A. khaki uniform, I walked the trails and immersed myself in the dense bamboo thickets the re-enactors had planted. This vegetation — an obvious signifier for Vietnam and other Asian landscapes — was incongruously situated in an area that once witnessed the U.S. Civil War, on a site densely populated by pines, spruce, horsetails and kudzu. The result was a striking conflation of histories: theirs, shaped by vicarious experiences filtered through news footage, literature and myth; and mine, formed by personal memory, family lore and ambivalent feelings about a devastating war — one perpetrated by a government that ultimately saved my family and me from Communism and granted us a new life. The re-enactors and I spontaneously connected through a shared fluency brought on by the popularization and retelling of the Vietnam War in popular culture. We bantered back and forth, testing one another's knowledge of classic war films, as well as fiction and nonfiction books. One-time participants from other states occasionally joined us, and the organizers would disclose my participation only at the last minute as a 'reveal' for the unsuspecting visitors. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
