Such cool stuff on the interweb...

bigrenna wrote:Such cool stuff on the interweb...

So cool. Nice find!

That was amazing. Talk about some long nights spent out there to get those shots. Really well done.

That was really cool, thanks for posting!

Good video. All pilots go west sometime.

Great video. Beautiful scenes.
On another note, are all those planes wrecked? A bunch of the trainers and small prop planes looked just fine, just decommissioned maybe? Think of all the money just sitting there decomposing...

Wow, this video really captures some of the magic. It reminds me how lucky we are.

Here's the Bone yards on the east side of Tucson.
https://www.google.com/maps/@32.1507114 ... a=!3m1!1e3

tcj wrote:Here's the Bone yards on the east side of Tucson.
https://www.google.com/maps/@32.1507114 ... a=!3m1!1e3

We tried driving in to one of them. We didn't get a very friendly welcome and were quickly turned around and chased out of there by the uniformed, weapon carrying gate keepers...

You can get a mini tour of the boneyard if you go to the PIma Air Museum just south of the base. Nobody is allowed off the bus and you only get a whiff of the inventory, but it is really impressive. I believe that the mothballed aircraft alone make it about the world's 5th largest air force.

I drove down Kolb Road in the 90's. There were B-52 tails visible in all directions. Most of the SAC fleet was taken there and beheaded with a giant guillotine. The body parts were left on the ground for 3-4 months so Russian satellites could photograph them to verify our compliance with SALT II treaty. Used to be able to see the carnage on the early satellite image programs, maybe a bit before Google Earth made its debut.

We should never have done that to any airplane (except maybe some of the butt-ugly British ones )

If you ever go through Tucson, don't leave without a visit to the PIma Air Museum. They have some really unique examples in their collection.

YB

Follow-up:

Google Earth has imagery back to 1992 in that spot. Here's the killing fields for our fleet of B-52's:



Some of them were still there a couple of years ago:



If you zoom in with Google Maps or Earth, you will see the next wave parked nearby. There is a long row of B-1 bombers waiting their fate. Don't think they will be chopped, just put out to pasture.
YB

YB, we did go to PIMA. It was quite neat. I really enjoyed it. We just saw a bone yard from the hwy on our way there and thought we'd drive through. We were very wrong. Oh well. Saw lots and lots of tails!

I was there a couple of weeks ago. Having lived in the area many years ago, I visited the boneyard several times. Didn't have time to stop in there recently but noticed the 'plane of choice', were the Hercules C-130. Seemed to be literally 100's of them lined up.