Education: Fresh Pilot

For three successful years, Major General James E. Briggs, 53, has test-piloted the U.S. Air Force Academy. As superintendent, he moved the school from makeshift quarters in Denver to its spectacular aluminum-and-glass complex near Colorado Springs, saw it accredited well in advance of the first graduation last month (TIME, June 1), earned presidential nomination for a third star. Last week, in a shift of duty after three years, the Pentagon announced a new assignment for Superintendent Briggs: chief of the Air Training Command at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio. Briggs’s academy successor: Major General William S. Stone, 49, commander of MATS’ Eastern Transport Air Force.

Airman Stone, who takes over in August, is as good an example of the military scientist-intellectual as the Air Force is likely to find. A Missouri-born West Pointer (1934), Stone is a meteorologist with an M.S. from Caltech (1938) and an economist with an M.A. from Columbia (1950). He won one Legion of Merit in World War II for forecasting weather for 6-29 bomber raids on Japan, won another for postwar personnel planning at the Pentagon. In 1951 Stone was co-author-editor of a war mobilization blueprint (Economics of National Security), has also had two teaching tours (economics, history, government) at West Point. His current MATS command—300 four-engine transports, 35,000 men, seven bases from New Jersey to Scotland —melds all of Airman Stone’s talents together. His Air Academy command is likely to meld them even further.