We have been rolling around with the debris of two moves back up from The Farm in rural Culpeper County to the urban amenities of Arlington on the banks of the Potomac. Some assorted memories surfaced in the process. This was one of them:

The somewhat ungainly gray turbo-prop aircraft in the foreground is shown as it flew from a Soviet air base on the Sea of Japan to visit USS Midway (CV-41). The flight occurred in 1979 in an excursion during joint US-ROK military exercises off the east coast of the Land of the Morning Calm. That turned the morning into a tripartite exercise with known airborne Communists. The Russian aircraft is an Ilyushin IL-38, known to us by the NATO code-name “May.” We understand the Soviet designers called it something else. “Dolphin?” We think you would agree it doesn’t have the same grace as the swimming mammals.

The picture is not annotated, so we can’t tell who actually snapped the button on the camera. The picture is kind of dramatic, and only shows about two thirds of the action, since there is another jet just over the port wing of the Russians, which makes the total number of engines- two each in th fighters and four more on the IL-38 rumbling in the sky alongside a fully working floating airfield.

The visible escorting fighter jet is from our squadron, VF-151. It is an F-4J. The picture may have come from another of the jets on that flight event in a day of routine operations. A look at the image 44 years later reveals a small square of paper pressed against the side windscreen of the May.

There was an old tradition of scrawling handwritten greetings between the aircrew of Russian and American aircrew. Not all of them are printable, even nearly a half century after this image was taken. The Chairman claims to have also been in this shot, though he would have been hunched over a desk below the dark coated steel of the flight deck. Those were interesting days in the Sea of Japan, even if you had to get up early for the excitement.

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
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