AN/FLR-9 at San Vito, Italy

In late March, 1986, I traveled with a co-worker to San Vito "Air Station" (i.e. staffed mostly by Air Force personnel, but no runways anywhere around). San Vito is near Brindisi, Italy; we were there to do a site survey pertaining to the installation of some equipment. What I remember most about this trip was that we arrived a day or two after the Navy sailed across the "line of death" into the Gulf of Sidra and mixed it up with Libyan strongman Col.Muammar Gaddafi. We were in Greece immediately before the visit to San Vito, so we flew from Athens to Rome (on Olympic Airways) en route to Brindisi. The Rome airport had been attacked by terrorists a mere three months earlier.  Within a day or two after we got back to the US, 4 Americans were killed when a bomb exploded on a TWA flight from Rome to Athens. For those of you who think terrorism (and aviation terrorism in particular) is a recent historical development...think again; this was 26 years ago. I did not get combat pay for this trip, but I did have some lousy pizza at Lecce, Italy (no tomato sauce), got caught in a semi-riot at a security checkpoint in Paris DeGaulle Airport, and flew Air France for the one and only time in my life (Paris to Houston). But these incidents are not visible from space; the San Vito FLR-9 antenna site is. The antenna was decommissioned when the US abandoned the base in 1993, no longer necessary with the end of the Cold War.

AN/FLR-9 antenna at San Vito Air Station, Italy [40 38 51N, 17 50 25E]