While Caesar 15 climbed high above the formation and critiqued each pilot’s position over our intra-flight UHF radio, I flew lower, level with the rest of the formation, and well clear of 5. I gave control of the jet to my WSO and pulled out the camera.

I had my Olympus C-700 Ultra Zoom digital camera in the cockpit with me, and it was the first time I'd used it for air-to-air photography.  The camera takes great photos for a "consumer" level camera (versus a professional camera which costs about twice as much) and I was anxious to find out how it handled taking pictures of airplanes.

As the skies cleared, the sun was shining bright and was giving fantastic conditions for picture taking. What I hadn't counted on when considering taking air-to-air pics from the F-15 was how tough it was going to be to operate the camera with my Nomex flying gloves on, my helmet and mask on, and my visor down.

The pushbuttons were clearly not made for operation with gloves, so they had to come off right away just to turn the camera on. When it came to zooming, framing the shots, and snapping the shutter, it would have been impossible to accomplish with just the tiny LCD viewfinder on the top left of the camera back. Luckily, the Olympus also has a large color LCD screen on the back of the camera body so I can evaluate the shots real-time. This allows me to change settings if required, as well as delete photos that don’t look up to snuff. Eventually, I had to take off my gloves, drop my mask, and raise my visor to really frame the photos correctly.

I continued to take pictures as we flew closer and closer to Long Island. The next event was one more photo opportunity while the formation flew over the Suffolk County Francis S. Gabreski Airport. The airport, named after Gabreski back in 1991, was just east of where the funeral was taking place and we’d fly right over it on the way to our holding point. The photo pass would require both of the camera airplanes to fly pretty tight formation, so "Gator" and I swapped control of the jet and I gave him the camera.

The solution to fix the frozen Olympus was to power off the camera and turn it back on, after which everything seemed to work normally. By that time, though, the Kodak moment was over.

After the flyover of Gabreski Airport, Caesar 11 cleared 15 and 16 to leave the formation and proceed south to our own holding pattern south of Long Island.  As it would turn out, the FAA waiver was written to only allow 4 airplanes to fly over the cemetery site.  That meant that we in the photo chase jets were out of luck as far as being able to overfly the funeral.  Our only other chance to actually be part of the formation would have been if any of the 4 primary jets had developed any kind of problem. Since all 4 other airplanes were still healthy, we split off to our orbit and waited for them to finish the flyby.

I took the opportunity to take some photos of my element leader as we flew over the beautiful Long Island coastline at the Hamptons. His WSO also snapped a few beautiful shots, in turn, of me flying formation with him.  Our Ground FAC who was at the funeral and coordinating our actual arrival time told us on the UHF radio that the priest was "stuck in traffic" and the "time over target" for our flyby would have to slip 20 minutes later.  

Due to the long distance we had to fly just to get to New York, we were pretty tight on fuel to begin with. Our fuel plan allowed a 15 minute hold, but didn't account for an additional 20 minutes on top of that!  The flight lead called me on our aux radio and asked to calculate the min fuel we needed to leave the flyby with and at Atlantic City instead of our planned destination, Andrews AFB.  My WSO broke out the IFR chart to calculate the distance to AC while I checked out the fuel burn tables in the jet’s checklist.