Sayanara F-14
I had wanted to write this when I could put up some more scanned RA5C pictures. Back in the last week of September I saw a news item that the Navy was a having a ceremony to mark the closing of the F-14 Tomcat program.
the end of the line for the F-14 Tomcat Even Slashdot covered this
Slashdot | The US Navy Says Goodbye to the Tomcat. Makes me feel old, I can remember when those were the 'new' Planes. With my computer mostly down I won't be able to do any scanning uploading of images for a few weeks, so I will put this post out without any pictures before it becomes irretrievably stale. I was hoping to find a picture of a Ra5c Vigilante with an F-14 among the pictures I have, which I didn't in any case. I only found one of an F-14 at all. I also got an email from Henner Lenhardt, whose father flew with Rvah 11 during the vietnam war. He sent some photos he had scanned; an impact fragment pulled out of his father's plane, the cover of the Jeffrey Ethell book "One day in a Long War", and a scan of a picture of a Ra5c in that book. I have to put those up once I have the new machine up and running. The news of the end of the F-14 program was not a complete surprise I had seen a big picture book on F-14 s, commemorating them come into the library earlier this summer.
Permalink 0967404053 Anytime, baby! : hail and farewell to the US Navy F-14 Tomcat One last note I saw an item in the paper that same week concerning Admiral Fallon who at one time was an Ra5c pilot. He is now the Commander US Pacific command which is one of these unified (Army/Navy/Airforce) world area commands. Not web-enabled at the moment I can't hunt that down right now, but I think it was on 23 Sep 06 in the Washington Post and involved Adm Fallon. trying to set up a reciprocal program with the Chinese military to send liasons to each other's military exercises with the idea that it reduce misunderstandings if the involved field officers knew the names of, and had met their opposite numbers. I imagine Adm. Fallon is a busy man at the moment.
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