The Raytheon/USN A-3 Skywarriors were elusive subjects for most photographers. Perhaps it was the impending retirement of the type that led to the appearance of one or two of the drab whales at airshows in Massachusetts in the mid-1990s.

I thought I had seen my last A-3 many years before, but with the appearance of 144838, marked as an ERA-3B, at SoWey on 3 June 1995, I elected to do a closeup study of the big Douglas attack job.

Delivered to the Navy as an A3D-2P in November, 1959, 144838 was taken out of storage at MASDC and converted to a ERA-3B standard at NARF Alameda and assigned to VAQ-34 in the 1981-1983 time frame.