Satoru Kuba spends parts of most days — and many nights — peering through a telephoto lens atop a three-story building overlooking Kadena Air Base on Okinawa. The goal of his sometimes-lonely vigil, through weather fair and foul? A photograph of an aircraft — any aircraft — that he has yet to capture on film. He spends so much time there that his young son thinks it’s his profession. Kuba insists he’s not a spy. He’s a plane spotter, a tail watcher — nicknames for aviation enthusiasts who post up outside air force [and navy] bases around the world to shoot photos and record tail numbers. Let me put this story in perspective: it was a tail-shooter who tipped me off to the bureau number snafu in the Scott Speicher case. For years the navy had the wrong bureau number affixed to this incident file as the aircraft he was flying at the time of his shoot down. An Italian tail-shooter spotted that bureau number on the aircraft it belonged to still flying out of China Lake with an experimental squadron; it took pointing this out to get the proper bureau number in his file and move on. Read AN AMERICAN IN THE BASEMENT to learn more about this and more.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:12:52 +0000
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