Kathy is the President of AeroComputers, an aerospace technology firm that is the industry leader in “providing tactical mission management systems for airborne applications that integrate the best in map data and generation.” The company was started by Kathy’s brother-in-law, the late Mark Gassaway, a pilot who invented the technology when he saw how cumbersome and antiquated paper maps were becoming in the face of technology. After his passing, Kathy stepped in to carry out three main arcs to get the company back in the forefront: raise employee morale, re-establish client relationships, secure partnerships with other industry manufacturers.
Transcript
My name is Kathy Tarr. I was Kathy Moral when I was at Pomona and I'm the president of AeroComputers. Wherever you live in The United States, you are protected by one of our pieces of equipment so what it does is allows an observer, it's called the tactical flight officer in a helicopter or fixed wing to be looking at a map to locate the position of the aircraft and also they typically have a camera onboard which is housed in a gimbal to give it a geolocation in space and then that allows a video to come in on the screen that's being observed so you can see where a car is for example or an incident or a fire or a flood or a mob and then the video can be taped and examined later. The footage that you saw if you did on the TV after the Boston Marathon, that was from our equipment. So wherever you are in The United States, there is undoubtedly an aircraft lying overhead protecting your safety. Well, I joined the company. I became the president four and a half years ago because my brother-in-law, my sister's husband invented the entire field 25 years ago and he drove to the corner of each of the maps, pages of the maps and geo located it and then stitched together the whole county of Los Angeles and Ventura and was able to put a GPS unit in a computer onboard the ship and the industry was born. I'm kind of completing trajectories that I established when I first took over four and a half years ago. Unfortunately, my brother-in-law was becoming ill and he did pass away so I took his vision and the things I needed to do first were to get the morale of the company. We have 25 employees up. Many were leaving, it was a stressful time. And then my second objective was to reestablish our relationships with our clients. They'd been somewhat neglected so I visiting, phone calls, everything. And then my final act was to get our industry partners on good footing with us. So the gimbal manufacturers, they search lights, the radios, radars, et cetera, integrators, and so that's what I've been doing so I generally act as sort of a cheerleader, a buyer and chief salesperson. I do a lot of traveling. I've been to South America several times and also to Europe many times, Canada, so those are some of the places where we have our equipment.
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