Visit to the aircraft boneyard…

As mentioned previously, there is another aircraft display in Tucson…the Airplane Graveyard.

This has morphed over the years into a restricted military base where they scavenge parts from older aircraft retired from military service to use on still active aircraft. Up until a couple years ago, this site allow public tours in buses around the site. They stopped doing that as it’s now full on military so I couldn’t get any pictures from inside the fence, only from the roadways outside of the site. I’d hoped there’d be a road on a hill overlooking the site but no such luck.

Anyway, here’s some not so good shots from the ring roads. First a few shots of leaving John’s place and some shots of the drive through Tucsons. The outskirts mostly.

After a 30 minute drive to east Tucson, we see our first aircraft at the Pima Air & Space museum I posted about last time.

And off in the distance not to far from the museum, we see the tails of aircraft parked at the graveyard.

There’s a bunch of them for sure. I couldn’t get a decent picture of the giant buildings where they do the work. Some of the tear down of aircraft for parts is done in the yard, but the refurbishment of active aircraft is hidden away from spying eyes.

Here’s the main gate and the sites water tower. It’s a desert here and it’s a drought so these towers are all over town it seems.

And that’s basically all we could see of the aircraft at the graveyard. I seem to remember that there’s a giant manned tower near those work buildings where they watch for any weird goings on outside the facility.

And that was the end of that tour. We always time these excursions in the late afternoon so we can head straight to a brew pub for a beer and dinner and this time we went to one of those chains…Applebees or something I forget. But they have excellent fish & chips.

And a couple finishing shots of the semi-back country roads we took to get to Applebees and then home. Looks like there’s not much around here but we’re just a couple blocks from giant malls and business and that sort of thing. You can see were on a 6 lane arterial roadway not the freeway which is an indicator of how non-rural this area is. Millions of people live around here.

The day before that tour, at John’s place, I took some shots of his interesting cactus.

And tree I guess.

Anyway, that is the end of all my interesting tours around Tucson and a week after this, I was back on the road to Pahrump and took a back road that looped through Why and Ajo. I’ll be back next time with some photos of that excursion. I’m now in Pahrump getting ready to head north to Milton Freewater Oregon, my recent home base.

Thanks for reading!