The Daily Mail has a pretty good piece up with about 30 non-traditional images from the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, better known as the Boneyard.
According to the Air Force’s official site on the base: Immediately after World War II, the Army’s San Antonio Air Technical Service Command established a storage facility for B-29 and C-47 aircraft at Davis-Monthan AFB. Today, this facility is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (309 AMARG), which has grown to include more than 4,400 aircraft and 13 aerospace vehicles from the Air Force, Navy-Marine Corps, Army, Coast Guard, and several federal agencies including NASA.
Besides the obvious excess inventory, there are a number of historic obsolete aircraft that should be on public display but are apparently just living out a dry life in the desert.
A Grumman F-14 Tomcat, bureau no. 159437, tail fin no. VF-101, one of two F-14’s that shot down two Libyan MiG-23’s near the Gulf of Sidra, in 1989 while conducting exercises off the USS John F. Kennedy. Maybe if the JFK, currently on donation hold, becomes a museum this old bird can be restored and reunited with Big John
The cockpit of this C-5 was tagged by its crew before leaving Memphis in 2011
As was the Air National Guard F-4…in 1982
A row of T-34 Mentors late of Meridian and Pensacola…why these can’t be transferred to overseas allies for flight training is lost on me.
A Boeing Vertol CH-46 Sea Knight, tail no.153993. According to the U.S. Marine Corps, this helicopter, Swift 2-2 was the last aircraft out of Vietnam. Known by its mission name, Swift 2-2, this CH-46 lifted the remaining 11 members of the Marine Guard off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon just before 8:00 a.m. on April 30, 1975. It was the last aircraft to touch and leave the U.S. Embassy as North Vietnamese tanks breached defenses on the outskirts of Saigon as the Vietnam War came to an end
