Shuffle off to Cefalu
I have here a picture of Navy RA5C flying over an antique town circa 1975 or 1976. I have paired it with a picture of the same area, approximateing the same angle, in current (Internet era) times pulled from Google Earth. Google Earth easily one of my favorite www programs. Google please don't sue me for using this picture. 
Navy RA5C over Cefalu Sicily Aug 1975
Cefalu in Google
Call it recreation of an aerial photo. What else is someone who briefly trained as a photo interpreter in the Navy but never had an opportunity to use it afterwards going to do. I had this idea for a while but was stymied by not knowing what town was in this picture. The picture was from before my time in the Navy. One of my unit RVAH-7's earlier deployments. On the USS Forestall to the Mediterranean in the mid 1970's. I recalled another version of the picture that had a frisket on it*. A frisket in our parlance was a small acetate overlay template on which we would use a Leroy lettering set to mark certain data: the date, flifgt crew, location, altitude, focal length of camera used etc. Eventually I was able to remember the frisket indicated this picture was taken over Cefalu Italy. Which proves to be a town on the north coast of Sicily Cefalu Sicily - Google Maps.
RVAH-7's 1979 USS Ranger cruise to the western Pacific, the one I participated in, didn't give up any post-card ready snaps like this. I can't think of any overwhelming reasons why not. Why a decent shot of the Intermuros or Baguio or
Alaminos City with an RA5C in the foreground couldn't have been obtained? The latter two both lovely towns with colonial era architecture. A coworker of mine in McKeldin library, Nina, owns part of a sea salt bed with her husband's family in Alaminos city.
There were a number of ordinary reasons why that last deployment didn't net a lot of trade and gift shots (we had a word for that which I can't remember right know). RVAH-7's embarkation on the USS Ranger was the last deployment of the RA5C's. The squadron, planes and program all decommissioned as soon as we returned to NAS Key West. We emptied our filing and storage cabinets into the dumpster behind the fleet hanger only dividing the nicer prints it seemed a shame to throw out among ourselves. The Navy was not spending money on the system and in truth our three planes were not flying much that last year. The squadron was off the ship and based at NAS Cubi Point through much of the mid summer so there may be be pictures of the Philippines I never saw. Since that was the interval of the port call to Hong Kong, which I stayed with ship's company for, there were no pictures of RA5C's against Victoria Peak produced. Pity. The phrase ADIZ line floats through my upper consciousness now in any regard. What; though, of the port call to Phattya beach? Surely one of RVAH-7's planes must have struggled off the flight deck at some point in the fortnight we were in those waters and done a low level fly-by of the beach. I would rather think that it is simply that I don't have those pictures, rather than that they don't exist. When I look at the pictures I do have. One thing jumps out. The pictures are either from earlier deployments, before I was in the squadron, or they are from the work-ups to this deployment, and are of southern Florida, or the southern California op-area. Once the cruise began, almost nothing from the RA5C Vigilante's assortment of large format sophisticated precision aerial photo cameras. What there is, is from the Navy's other photo reconnaissance system (see illustration at bottom here from one Marco Antonetto's web site Topcon Info ). Many of these give the appearance of being taken by the RAN of an F-4 while flying upside down at 600 mph. This is because well, they probably were. I'll have to scan some of those sometime. Oh mighty, and largely indestructible, Topcon; the last laugh here seems to be yours.
*Addedum 26 Nov 09 I found the frisketed version containing what I now call the picture's metadata. . Date was 04 Aug 1975, 2, 000 ft over Cefalu Italy. Sensor was the right oblique with a 6" focal legnth. Produced by Odegaard / Osbourne: Reconatkron Seven. Flying off the USS Forestall.
11:48:10 PM  ;;
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