Somewhere over the North Atlantic, in late 1973 or early 1974, a US Air Force F-4C Phantom flew a barrel roll around a Soviet Tu-95 Bear. The Soviet crew had asked for it, by hand signal, through the glass.

The photographs were taken by Robert M. Sihler, the weapon systems officer in the back seat of one of the Phantoms. They have been circulating again this week, and the story behind them is better than the usual Cold War-standoff reading of the pictures.

The job at Keflavik

The 57th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, the Black Knights, sat at Keflavik from November 1954 until March 1995. Four decades of one task: watching the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap, the choke point through which Soviet aircraft and submarines had to pass to reach the Atlantic.

They did it in Northrop F-89 Scorpions, then Convair F-102 Delta Daggers, then Phantoms from 1973, then F-15 Eagles from 1985. Ground radar found the contact, the alert pair launched, and somewhere out over grey water they slid alongside whatever had come down from the north. The squadron logged over a thousand intercepts inside Iceland’s air defence identification zone.

Sihler’s year there was unaccompanied, one of those tours where the family stays behind. He had entered active duty in October 1969. By the time he arrived, the Tu-95s were coming past at a rate of about two a week, most of them running the long leg from Murmansk down to Cuba.

Who asked for the barrel roll

This is the part that gets misread. The usual caption treats the roll as a taunt, a fighter pilot showing a bomber crew what an aeroplane can really do.

It was a request, and it came from the Soviets.

A Tu-95 is not a small aeroplane and it is not a fast one, and its crew had many hours of ocean to look at. When an American fighter arrived alongside, they photographed it. Then they asked it to do something worth photographing.

The famous frame, the one where the Phantom appears inverted above the bomber, is not a jet flying upside down for effect. Sihler has explained that the aircraft was on the back side of a barrel roll, caught at the moment the manoeuvre was ending.

Both sides were taking pictures

The detail that makes the whole thing land is that the photography went both ways. Sihler was shooting the Bear. The Bear’s crew were shooting him.

Somewhere in a Russian archive, or a drawer in a flat in Murmansk, there are almost certainly pictures of Sihler’s Phantom taken from the other aeroplane on the same afternoon. Two crews, nominally preparing to kill each other, spent the encounter photographing each other and then went home.

That closeness is the precondition for the whole story. You cannot hand-signal a request across a mile of sky. These intercepts were flown wingtip to wingtip, close enough to read expressions, and the routine repetition of them, twice a week for years, turned a confrontation into something closer to an acquaintance.

What changed

It is worth setting this against the present, because the contrast is the reason the photographs are circulating again.

The intercept itself has not changed much. NATO has scrambled fighters around 700 times in two years against Russian activity near its borders, and Polish fighters meet Il-20s off their coast at roughly monthly intervals. The mechanics are the same: radar contact, alert launch, visual identification, escort until it turns away.

What has gone is the tone. This week a Russian frigate fired two flares at a Danish helicopter photographing it over the Baltic, one of which passed close to the aircraft, and Copenhagen summoned the Russian ambassador. Fifty years ago the equivalent encounter involved hand signals and a request for aerobatics.

It would be sentimental to over-read this. The 1970s had plenty of dangerous intercepts, and a Tu-95 heading for Cuba was not a friendly aeroplane. Sihler himself frames the mood as a function of the moment: the Cold War was winding down, and attitudes had improved. Both halves of that sentence matter. The warmth was a symptom of the temperature, not a cause of it, and the temperature has changed.

The photographs

The images belong to Sihler, who took them from the back seat of a Phantom half a century ago with a personal camera, on a job that mostly consisted of grey ocean. They surfaced publicly through The Aviationist in 2017, along with his explanation of what was happening in them, and they have been reposted at intervals ever since, usually without it.

Sources: The Aviationist (interview with Robert M. Sihler, December 2017); Robert M. Sihler; US Air Force; 57th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron unit history; theaviationcircle on Instagram; Afterburner reporting