The description under the photo completely wrong. The Ranger wasn’t in the Gulf (never was in the 80s) and the closes the ship was in 1989 was in the Straits of Hormuz for a single mission for a couple of hours to photo graph the Iranian coast. Then the ship headed back to the Indian Ocean (Operation Earnest Will happened not long prior). The photo was taken around February 1989 during Rough Training which is the very last assessment before a carrier was deployed for a WESTPAC that is a six month deployment away from homeport. The ship was actually off the coast of Mexico hiding from the Air Force while play war games (The ship lunched an Alpha Strike on Hill Air Force Base during the same period that was the longest training carrier strike at that time). The carrier was preparing for the deployment preparing to crosses the time zone that triggered Russian bombers to locate and track the carrier before they were in range of Russia during the Cold War. A Russian surveillance ship would be off the coast of Hawaii waiting for the carrier to leave port on the journey to cross the Pacific Ocean and report back that the carrier was underway. Then Russian Bears and Badgers would locate the carriers and to take a photos and track the carrier until the ship was past Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam where they were stationed out of. The Air Force was playing the role of the Russians and the carrier’s goal was to intercept the bombers once they were in range to escort them through the carrier air space preparing for the “real life” mission that was soon to happen. F-14s would fly on both sides of the bomber and escort them through the carrier airspace. Unlike what was posted under the photo on the website, mostly on the crew on the fight deck saw the fly-by because the ship was in the middle of flight ops that prevented most the ship in seeing the planes (the photo that you have was taken from vulture’s row that is located along the upper section of the island). Plus, B-1s also did fly-bys along with the B-52s. The first B-1 was about 100 feet off the deck with two F-14s on both sides. TheB-1 bomber was probably going around 150-200mph then she kicked into afterburners and surprised the F-14s as they struggle to stay with the bomber. I was actually working on the bow (Fly 1) during the war games and took photos looking “down” at the same bomber that you have but I can’t find that photo right now. I did enclosed a photo of the bomber flying lower but didn’t reach the lowest point yet. We actually flew for four days straight at the end of the exercise and finally pulled back into San Diego as we felt like zombies.