Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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".

Of the 112 pages in this book, only 4 do not contain photographs. Every one of the photos is on full color. There's a picture of a C-124C Globemaster, taken in 1972, that looks as if I took it with my digital camera yesterday (2008). The photo's are that nice. This books covers the early years of Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona from WWII until today. Don't look for a lot of photos of WWII warbirds in this one, though. DMAFB mostly housed B-29's after the war, all the other warbirds and bombers were mostly stored at Altus, OK; Kingman, AZ; and Ontario, CA. Whats fascinating about this book is the Cold War era bombers and fighters. Also some of the photos of the preserved Century Series fighters are stunning. There's a ground eye view of F-4's...nose to tails...as far as the eye can see. Some of the aircraft look as if they still have more missions in them...more adventures and glory to capture, while others are broken up into barely recognizable pieces or have weed's growing through their useless hulks. You'll find yourself spending hours looking over the photos and reading the beautiful descriptions, then return to the cover and start reading the actual history of the field. Overall, a great buy for any aviation enthusiast.

Having lived around the boneyard for a number of years this book helped me remember some of it. My father would and still passes by alot of the airplanes today on his way to work or what ever. It was interesting to read it from an Englishman's point of view.

I just love the Boneyards. Apart from the fact that most of the aircraft that are placed there will be turned into scrap eventually, it's important to me that what does enter is recorded. I am not a local to the US so I don't get there personally enough for my liking but I love what others have recorded for me. Therefore, it's no surprise that I have given this a 5 star rating.

This is the third volume of photos in author Chinnery's series on the Davis-Monthan 'boneyard.' This volume distinguishes itself by making a passing attempt at providing history and context about the place. This is done by including some archival photos and a tantalizingly brief narrative that could have been extracted from an extant document produced at the facility. Beyond that the reader is presented with, again, another view into what appears to be the author's photo collection.