My company actually built one of the first fully digital aerial mapping systems (commercially at least) using the slightly newer and publicly available Kodak DCS's (~94). They were very nice cameras, especially for the time. I cant even imagine doing this kind of work with film, it would be so tedious. The speed to process the data was incredible when going all digital. This made up for the loss in detail compared to film for most jobs, especially since our costs were quite a bit lower.

Also interesting, is if i recall correctly Kodak actually made about 100 colour infrared versions too which was nice... until we couldn't reliably source them out! We ended up having to burn the filter off of the CCD of the standard RGB cameras systems with some sort of acid solution turning them back into their natural CIR mode.