November 7, 2019 Meeting (includes Audio)
Posted November 8, 2019 at 1:50 PM, Filed Under: All News, Front Page, Meetings
Our November speaker was Lt. Col. Retired Air Force Pilot Rick Rohas.
Rick was born and raised in a small town in southern Delaware on the Nanticoke River. When he was about five years old he remembers seeing a biplane above his house and knew he wanted to be a pilot someday.
Eventually while attending Virginia Tech and working for DuPont he was able to pay for flying lessons at a local grass strip. This led to being inducted into Air force active duty service in January 1973. After training with three different types of jets, Rick was assigned to fly the C-130 Hercules in and out of Clark Air Base in the Philippines from 1974 to 1978. His most exciting missions were hauling Vietnamese refugees from Saigon to Clark Air Force Base. rick also had many other missions in southeast Asia, including Korea’s DMZ to keep North Korea in check.
In 1988, after moving to Richmond, Rick transitioned to support duty as a liaison officer for the Air Force Academy and ROTC, a position he continues to hold today. Some of his high school students went on to other ROTC programs, some went into the Air Force and some became pilots themselves.
In 1990, Rick flew support transport for he Virginia Air National Guard until he retired in 1996. He continued flying as a commercial pilot until retirement in 2014.
Audio from the meeting.