Edward Kudzia, BSAE 1975, Airline Captain, American Eagle Airlines
Edward Kudzia, his youngest daughter Michelle, her friend Chyna, and his oldest daughter Nikki, taken by his wife, Noemi, Virginia Beach, July 2013. This was the annual Autonomy Competition for watercraft. Nikki is a senior in Naval Architecture/Marine Engineering at U of M and has participated in the competition for the last two years.
The year was 1975. I would graduate at the end of the fall term that year. At some point during the’74-’75 school year, Professor Harm Buning put forth the idea of a student outing to view the launch of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) that summer. The ASTP involved the launch of an American flight crew into low Earth orbit to rendezvous and dock with a Soyuz craft launched by the Soviet Union. The combined crews would then spend a week working together in orbit conducting experiments before returning to their home countries. This would mark the beginning of an era of US-Soviet cooperation in space exploration that would outlast the cold war to the present day. The idea was greeted with a lot of enthusiasm; I especially thought it would be a great way to cap off my senior year at Michigan. I was very lucky in that I’ve seen the launches of Apollos 11, 15(with an all U of M crew), 16, 17, and the first two Skylabs prior to this. My group arrived days before the launch allowing us to enjoy the beach and other local attractions. Read More »
