While in Tucson we visited the Pima Air & Space Museum which is located at the Tucson Aircraft Boneyard.  For those who may not be familiar with the boneyard, this is where all the old aircraft go to die.  You may have seen aerial photos of the thousands and thousands of old aircraft parked out in the desert for the rest of their lives or be used for replacement parts as possible. I have always wanted to visit here and so we did on this trip.

When you arrive at the site there are two tours.  One is of the larger area where there are approximately 4000 aircraft of different types, mostly military, but also some commercial and other.  This is the tour I originally wanted to take, just to be able to be out there in the middle of all these aircraft and hopefully get some cool photos.  I think in the past, several years ago, the restrictions were more lax and they would let you go out there and do more or less what you wanted as you walked around and viewed the aircraft.  But now with ever tightening security and other regulations and national concerns, you have to go as part of a tour.  The nice thing is that you get to ride on a large air conditioned tour bus, but the bad thing is that they never let you get off the bus to walk around, and all the windows are tinted so it would be awful for trying to take photos, although the tour itself just to view the aircraft would still be a great thing to do.

So instead we opted to tour the Pima Air & Space Museum which is at the same site and is a large facility with about 7 huge building full of aircraft and then an outdoor area with about another 350-400 aircraft of all types.  We spent about 4-5 hours altogether, walking through the buildings and then taking an hour tour on a tram through the outside exhibits.  The real plus of visiting the museum is that after you take the tram tour you are allowed to go back on foot and walk around and view and take photos of whatever you want.  I had a great time there and I think Cheryl really enjoyed it too.  I took a load of photos which I've tried to scale down for this slideshow.  It was kind of hard photographing most aircraft just by themselves because they were so close together in many areas.  But I enjoyed taking the photos that I could and I'm looking forward to going back again to spend more time and also to take the other tour.  Hope you enjoy the show!

Click on the photo link below to access Part 3 of the May 2016 Western Trip.  Thanks for watching!

May 2016 Western Trip - Part 03While in Tucson we visited the Pima Air & Space Museum which is located at the Tucson Aircraft Boneyard. For those who may not be familiar with the boneyard, this is where all the old aircraft go to die. You may have seen aerial photos of the thousands and thousands of old aircraft parked out in the desert for the rest of their lives or be used for replacement parts as possible. I have always wanted to visit here and so we did on this trip.