Thursday March 9th 2017

Today was a tourist day. I went to the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson. It is next to the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base which houses the 309 Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group(309 AMARG) also known as the aircraft bone yard. One of the added attractions at the museum is a bus trip trough the bone yard.

Aircraft on the floor and hanging in the main hanger.

F-14 Tomcat

German V1 Buzz Bomb.

The museum is about an hour away from my RV home. I arrived a little after ten and departed around three in the afternoon. The museum has four hangers of aircraft, a building dedicated to space and another building dedicated as a memorial to the 390th bombardment group which was part of the 8th air force in England during WWII. There are also many planes and helicopters on display throughout the grounds. The majority of the aircraft are military, but there are also many commercial aircraft.

B-29

Mohawk Observation Plane

Presidential and VIP transport aircraft. The jet transport is the plane used to bring the Iranian hostages home.

F-105 from Vietnam era

F-18 used by Blue Angels

Line of aircraft in the museum

More lines of aircraft in the musuem

They advertise this museum as the 3rd largest aircraft museum in the country. The Smithsonian Air & Space museum and the Air Force museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio are the two bigger museums. I’ve been to both over the years as well as other aviation museums. This one concentrates on the aircraft more than the story surrounding the aircraft. Other museums like to tell a story about the aircraft in action. This museum is focused more on the direct facts such as type and service dates. The big value at this museum are the many volunteer docents. They are mostly retired military pilots with lots of stories and a desire to tell them.

390th Group Memorial Museum

B-17 in the 390th Memorial Museum

The 390th Bombardment Group memorial museum is a real tribute the B-17 crews operating out of England during the Second World War. It houses a B-17 and the archives of the 390th Bombardment Group. Special today and most Thursdays a former pilot of a B-17 in WWII is on hand to tell stories of his service. The gentleman is in his 90s and does a great job of giving the crowd a sense of his life during the war. I could have spent more time listening to him, but I had a bus to catch.

In addition to the museum, I purchased a ticket for a bus ride through the aircraft bone yard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. From the seat of a Grey Line Bus I saw the acres and acres of mothballed aircraft. US Military planes that are no longer used in active service are brought to the desert. The low humidity and soil like concrete make it ideal for keeping the aircraft viable. They are kept for possible re-activation, for parts on other similar aircraft, for sale to other governments or eventual scrap.

Fighter aircraft in the bone yard. Photo through bus window

C-130 aircraft in the bone yard

C-5 aircraft in the bone yard

Everything from little helicopters, primary training aircraft, tankers and big huge C-5 cargo planes are lined up side by side. The docent on the bus tour told the story of using the planes in the bone yard to keep the air wings of the Air Force, Navy and other services operational. The basic premise is without the bone yard we wouldn’t be able to keep all the aircraft we have operational.

I enjoyed seeing the museum and the bone yard. I’ll probably do the museum again when I’m in the area. It is constantly changing and improving. Boeing donated the second 787 it built to the museum. It was a test aircraft that couldn’t be used in commercial service. It arrived at the museum last summer. In the past week an F-16 arrived at the museum. For some reason, it’s the first F-16 the museum has obtained for its collection.

I probably won’t tour the bone yard again. It is definitely something to see once, but perhaps not multiple times. The magnitude of the collection of aircraft is the primary attraction. The fact that there are more C-130s now than there was another time is not as interesting.