After 45 years of service, the Navy EA-6B Prowler has made its final flight.
The aircraft was retired last week with a three-day commemoration at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington.
The aircraft made its first flight May 25, 1968, went operational in July 1971 and made its first deployment, to Southeast Asia, in 1972, according to the Navy. It has seen action in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, supported NATO operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Yugoslavia and enforced no-fly zones around Iraq.
When I transferred from the Commercial side of IBM to the Federal Systems side in late 1967 this was one of the first programs I worked on. A second was the F111 Aardvark which was retired from the US Forces in the 1990s but stayed in service in the Australian AF until 2010. The F111 had Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) rates that were next to impossible to meet at the time - we put a lot of long hours in getting the computers out the door for that one.
The aircraft was retired last week with a three-day commemoration at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington.
The aircraft made its first flight May 25, 1968, went operational in July 1971 and made its first deployment, to Southeast Asia, in 1972, according to the Navy. It has seen action in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, supported NATO operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Yugoslavia and enforced no-fly zones around Iraq.
When I transferred from the Commercial side of IBM to the Federal Systems side in late 1967 this was one of the first programs I worked on. A second was the F111 Aardvark which was retired from the US Forces in the 1990s but stayed in service in the Australian AF until 2010. The F111 had Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) rates that were next to impossible to meet at the time - we put a lot of long hours in getting the computers out the door for that one.