Flightdeck Friday – A Look Back in Time

Taking a break from the series on the Tu-22/Tu-22M — fear not, we’ll hit it again next week.  Instead, YHS has been busy working down the boxes of slides accumulated over the last several decades via a nifty little device that makes it easy to digitize them.  Today’s selection hails from the period 1980 – 81 and ranges from the Indian Ocean and the IKE/CVW-7 record deployment that year (347 days underway) and the reward awaiting the Bluetails of VAW-121 upon our return just before Christmas — that the New Year would bring an extended deployment to NAS Keflavik, Iceland forthwith to hunt Bears (of the Tu-95 variety) with the Black Knights of the 57th FIS.  We’ve written about that Cold War adventure in the early days of this blog – now you get to see some of the stills.