Thanks everybody. It was a lot of fun going through the albums and I'm glad to see some others enjoyed them also. I'm 32, he's been retired for 21 years, and I'm honestly not sure I'd ever seen them before. To answer the question asked in the last post, Dad was not a photographer. He was a back seater in the F-4 and F-14 and has 1000+ hours in both. He's the backseater in the last photo of my original post. He was Junior enough at the time that he didn't have his own plane, so that is not his name on the fuselage.
I took the albums back to him Sunday morning and got to ask a few questions.
The Bicentennial plane is one that he flew in the air show circuit. I knew that already and actually grew up with a poster size photo of it on my bedroom wall. Thought I should mention it though.
The SR-71 was doing intercept/radar stuff and Dad's squadron had F-4s and 14s. The sent 2 of each out to meet up with it and after they were done, they got in formation and did a low pass down the runway. I can't remember which airport.
The Russian Bear photo is the one I really wanted to ask about. It seemed odd that we would be flying with the Russians at the time in history, and it turns out we weren't. The Bears would come over and we scrambled our planes to intercept. They would often go up next to them and there were pictures taken. Still enemies and they weren't flying together. I made a joke about getting a shot of the Russian plane while "inverted" and he didn't get the reference. Made me sad.
