New York is a big state, and six weeks earlier, on the afternoon of 5 October 1973, I was shooting Kodachrome under more favorable circumstances off the approach end of runway 32 at Calverton, 420 km to the south on Long Island. As the factory number implies, this is the thirty-sixth F-14 Tomcat, and borrowing from Joe Baugher's research, we find it is F-14A-65-GR 158635 on final at the Grumman factory.
This was the first Tomcat I photographed, and remains one of my favorite shots of the type to this day. I had seen a few Tomcats prior to this, as they commonly made approaches to Westover AFB, in Massachusetts in the early 1970s. The large SAC base was nearly vacant then, before AFRES took it over, and it likely made a good cold weather destination for test flights, away from the congestion of the Big Apple and the cold North Atlantic.