50 Years of the Desert Boneyard: Davis Monthan A.F.B. Arizona [Paperback]

Philip D. Chinnery (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Motorbooks International (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0760301875
• ISBN-13: 978-0760301876
• Product Dimensions: 10.6 x 8.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #780,769 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent but sad pictures of retired aircraft, March 2, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (San Diego) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 50 Years of the Desert Boneyard: Davis Monthan A.F.B. Arizona (Paperback)

This book is a valuable resource for aircraft modelers and aviation enthusiasts. It contains many excellent pictures of aircraft, often in service paint schemes, preserved at Davis-Montham AFB in Tucson, AZ. Each plane is a moment of history frozen in time, poised at the end of a valuable service career but not yet broken up for scrap. Many of the pictures make you sad to think of once-proud aircraft, now cast off unwanted. Although this book does not puport to be anything but a documentation of the career of the Boneyard at Davis-Montham, I would have appreciated more detail on the aircraft themselves. However, I highly recommend this book for modelers as it provides color pictures of many aircraft not often seen in other publications.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book on the Boneyard, August 15, 2001

By 

BookGuy (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 50 Years of the Desert Boneyard: Davis Monthan A.F.B. Arizona (Paperback)

This is a worthy successor to Philip D. Chinnery's previous pictorial essays on the Boneyard (1987's "Desert Boneyard", and 1989's "Desert Airforce"...both out-of-print). The format is larger, and the quality of the photos is excellent. There's also a tantalizing mix of aircraft...you can hardly wait to turn the page and see what glorious old bird is baking in the hot desert sun on the next page. You really get a feel for the place, and you see more on these pages than you'd ever get to see in real life; mostly because the tours don't take you everywhere Chinnery was able to go. You'll see F-105s, F-102s, F-100s, F-4s, A-7s, F-111s, B-52s, even A-10s, C-141s, F-14s, F-15s and F-16s. Plus other, much older aircraft, helicopters, utility aircraft and aircraft types too numerous to mention. There's a fine section on the early history of the base, and descriptions of the storage process, too. I think you'll like it.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great coffee table book, April 16, 2001

By 

"weirdo_87" (Rancho Cucamonga, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 50 Years of the Desert Boneyard: Davis Monthan A.F.B. Arizona (Paperback)

This book has much detailed information on the history of the storage yard at Davis-Monthan AFB, in Tucson Arizona. Seeing has to how I am an aircraft nut (Mostly military), I got a kick out of the fact that all the pictures were color! And the photos are almost all of aircraft. Rare aircraft included are the XB-19, B-36, RA-5C, C-133 and the NB-52E. The only problem is that just one photo of each of the above aircraft is in the book. In addition, the book also has details about how the aircraft are preserved in storage and what uses they have at the yard. Not all are scrapped or salvaged of parts, but some go on to civilian lives as firebombers or transports and some are sold to warbird collectors. For example, The Pima Air-Space Museum has many aircraft that are on loan from D-M (Then again, it is very near the base). This has to be the best book ever on the place that is mistakenly called "The Boneyard".