Jet Paint Jobs
I got an email the other day from Kent Dotson, one of the people I knew in the Navy - in Rvah 7. Kent was Mark's roommate along with a guy we called Smithy. He sent a picture he had of an Ra5c on the flight deck. What you see here is a Vigilante on the far waist catapult about to be launched. And indications (the trail of steam) that one has just gone off from the near cat.  Not knowing anything about the provenance of the picture there are a few things that struck me about that picture from what I can make out of the squadron insignia it is RVAH-7. The ship is the USS Ranger (NE), which is painted on the A-4 in the foreground. The USS Ranger had A-7's and A-3's [ed. note: well we did have sky pigs at one point I got a picture to prove it - but what I really meant to say here was "A-6"] the year I was on it, as memory serves, but it serves only so well. The paint scheme of the Vigi - white nose cone no star on the tail differs from what we used for the cruise as you can see this in the picture below, which I took quay side probably in Subic bay, the Philippines . I'm guessing the picture above is from work-ups before the WestPac deployment. This whole post here is an example of why it is bad to start new projects late in the evening. I took both pictures here duplicated them, cropped the duplicates tighter, resized them and compressed them to reduce the file size. And then I went- uploaded the original of Kent's and an intermediate variant of mine before I compressed it. Kent's picture if you copy it out of the page is much larger than I've set it to display here at 378 pixels width. I am going to swap these out for the smaller versions in a day or so. I am still on dial-up here. {One last note; Kent, I assume you have Mark's email address, if not ask me for it. }
11:52:06 PM  ;;
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