The first people demanding flight crew attention were the maintenance ground troops. They had to know the status and condition of the just-landed airplane so that it could be serviced and fixed, if there were problems, battle damage or the like. Being able to turn the planes around and available for the next flight was a high priority.
Intelligence de-briefing then followed. In addition to wanting knowledge about how the mission went and were the targets "hit", those fellows wanted confirmation of the enemy threat briefing received before take-off, and any changes to the threat situation observed during the flight. Were there new or unexpectedly active anti-aircraft guns, surface to air missile activity, or even small arms fire. Were enemy aircraft seen, a special concern for missions to the north? And were any new signs of enemy activity, troop concentrations or unusual situations encountered? Aerial reconnaissance crews were trained to be both equipment operators and observers of the world around them.
The last de-briefing for the crews, immediately after landing, was at the operations desk for that's where the Squadron Commander or his Operations Officer (or at least the senior duty officer at the desk) wanted a full verbal accounting of how the mission went. Did you get the targets? Was the tanker there on time and where it was supposed to be? What was the enemy activity in the target area? Were you shot at? What's the status of your airplane? And, finally, were you guys hit and are you all right?
These de-briefings over, an hour or so after touchdown, you'd think that you were done. Well, not necessarily so. For while this was going on the photo boys were downloading your camera magazines and rushing them to the photo laboratory for processing and evaluation. They even retrieved the navigator's flight charts and notes, for use in correlating the route of flight and camera ON-OFF times with the images on the film.
Here is a snapshot of the photo lab and facilities where the photo interpreters (PI's) worked. It looks like a sad version of a modern RV park, but it's actually a complex network of connected vans. Some are strictly for film processing, with their associated support equipment, power systems and environmental control. Others house sophisticated work stations where the PI's hunch over light tables, peering through magnification lenses and stereo viewers. Image analysis, scaling and intelligence data gathering is serious business, performed by skilled and highly trained officers and enlisted personnel.
The variety of film evaluated, literally miles and miles of it per day, included black and white negatives as small as 4.5"x4.5" per frame, yard-long negatives taken by the horizon-to-horizon panoramic camera, plus large format film used in the high altitude and oblique looking cameras. Film from three types of recce airplanes passed through these vans daily, these being the RF-101's, RF-4C's and RB-57's stationed at Tan Son Nhut air base near Saigon. Imagery from the latter two also included spectacular color slides, large format. These were truly impressive. But most work was done from negative black and white images. Only a small fraction of these images were converted to positive prints and then often enlarged to 8"x10" or better.
The skilled PI's worked mostly from the freshly developed negatives, sometimes still a bit wet on high priority, especially urgent targets. To assist these people in correlating the images captured with ground locations, three aids were used. Much of the three-tiered jungle of South Vietnam looks pretty much the same, so it's vital that the PI's knew precisely where the airplanes were when the pictures were taken. The navigator's annotated chart was one key, but so too was the imagery from the downward-looking infrared scanner. It captured a long strip image of what was immediately beneath the airplane throughout much of the flight into and out of the target areas.
This served as a long, narrow road map of sorts, portraying rivers, forest openings, roads or trails (if any) and other images leading to and from the targets.
But often the third key was needed too, that being the assistance of the flight crew. Both the navigator and the pilot were often called into the PI work areas to assist in correlating film imagery with the actual route of flight and camera ON-OFF times. This was of great interest to the crews, for they not only were concerned about their success or failure to in "hitting" the assigned targets, they were darned curious about what was down there and important enough to send them into harm's way.
Sometimes we'd spend a couple hours or more working with the
PI's after a mission. Not all missions required us to be there,
but many did. And sometimes, depending upon the backlog of PI
work and the urgency of the targets "hit", our visits to the PI
vans took place a day or two after the mission. There were
times, however, when we went right to the vans immediately after
our several de-briefings.
So, when you add up the hours involved in post-flight work with the duration of the flight itself, and the two hours spent in preparation before take-off, each work day was long. A three-hour flight could thus entail an eight to ten hour period. Some were shorter, of course, and then a few were much longer. I averaged about three flights a week during my year "in country" and accumulated 168 combat missions.