Tarbox Tomcats

As the readership may know, your blogmeister has a thing for Cats of the two-tail variety as well as 'purty pikshurs... so today we present a B-U-T-FULL snap of a pair'a Tomcats from VF-33, the Starfighters, near a place called Coffin Island, Puerto Rico back on April 1st, 1990.

VF-33 was at the time embarked aboard USS America (CV-66) as part of Carrier Air Wing One (CVW-1). Over the years, many an enthusiast has mistakenly attributed the callsign 'Tarbox' specifically to VF-33... 'tis not so... VF-33's tactical callsign at that time was 'Starfighter', while 'Tarbox' was the callsign for CVW-1. But an air wing's callsign could be adopted by any squadron of the wing under certain circumstances.  The more you know...

Nomenclature, Baby!

U.S. Navy photo by LCDR K. P. Neubauer

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Вдоводел

Today we bring you a fine photo of a Tupolev Tu-22, known by NATO as the 'Blinder' and by her crews as the 'Widowmaker'... the latter because of the type's propensity for killing said crews. High landing speeds, unreliable engines, and squirrelly handling characteristics all combined for lotsa oopsies. And with the type's downward-firing ejection seats, well... that made low altitude punch-outs somewhat, shall we say... unattractive... so crews usually opted to ride it out during the many takeoff and landing accidents which occurred during the type's service history.

Anyhoo, this particular jet is a Tu-22R recce variant, operated by the 199th Independent Long-Range Reconnaissance Aviation Regiment (say that ten times fast), flying outta Nizhyn Air Base, Ukraine during the 1980s.

Enjoy, but you might wanna consider transferring to fighters...

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kalinin photo

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