Local teachers boarded the 'gas station in the sky'   

From Staff Reports

  Area teachers flew high over the Atlantic Ocean in a Tennessee Air National KC-135 guard tanker while attending East Tennessee State University's 2004 Aerospace Basic Workshop.
  The three-week-long workshop is dedicated to raising awareness of aerospace to teachers so they can tie it into math, science and English courses. Sandy Barker, a Tennessee Technology Center instructor at Elizabethton said, "It's a cool way to get students interested in science."
  According to Barker they learned a lot of interesting facts about the "gas station in the sky." It can reportedly pump in one minute enough fuel to fill the average car for an entire year, from 12 feet away.
  NASA educators came to ETSU to teach the first week of the course, and the following week 29 teachers and three instructors were flown at 450 mph by the 134th Air Refueling Wing on a mission to refuel F16s over the Atlantic, and then to Kennedy Space Center.
  Unaka Elementary School teachers Susan Colbaugh and Amy Moore, along with Barker, participated in the workshop.