The 26th of May starts like most days recently. Early up for breakfast, another bag drag, and off to the airport for a pre-flight. Today we're doing the whole day with VFR flight following, going first to Tucson International Airport and a visit to the Pima Air & Space Museum, and then on to Carlsbad NM in the late afternoon.
I had been emailing Harry Radcliffe (one of our partners in the Cessna and the original owner who formed our partnership) about an oil change during the trip. Harry noted we had to have three engine cylinders inspected according to an Airworthiness Directive (AD).
ADs are published by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) when a defect or recurring problem is detected in an aircraft or any of its components. There is an AD for three ECI cylinders Harry had installed at the last engine overhaul. While ADs vary in their directions for implementation, this one was mandatory. It made no allowances for exceeding the interval between inspections.
This worked worked out well as I called Premier Aviation in Tucson a few days ahead. After swearing they could do the AD and had Champion oil filters (Harry's preference ;-), we scheduled the maintenance and an oil change. All we needed to do was show up around 0900 the 26th.
The flight down was easier than taxiing to Premier. Seems there were two of us landing at Tucson with similar tail numbers ending in Two One Tango (21T). Ground control got us across the active runway and then lost track of Ann and I. Being unfamiliar with the airport, I called for help getting to the shop and advised of our location. A new ground guy who had been talking to the other 21T got really excited, wondering how on earth we had gotten all the way over there ;-).
We finally got it all sorted out and found Premier. They were extremely helpful getting us to the location where we had rented a car, and providing directions to the museum.
Pima is quite a place. They have some terrific facilities with aircraft on display both indoors and outdoors. The indoor facilities tend to specialize on different eras: early years of flight, WWI, WWII, and so on. There are people on hand in every facility to answer questions and tours taking you throughout the outdoor displays and over to Davis Monthan (DM) AFB.
DM AFB, also known as the aircraft boneyard, is located right next door to Pima. This is where the Department of Defense (DOD) sends all the old aircraft they no longer intend to fly regularly. There are also some commercial firms who contract with DM for similar services. The folks at DM either cut them up for scrap, or shrink wrap them to preserve the aircraft for flight or the parts they might cannibalize at a later date.
It's quite an operation when you consider the sheer number of aircraft at DM, the number of countries who fly aircraft built in the US, the maintenance that has to take place to keep flyable aircraft flyable, and the paperwork that has to be maintained to keep track of every part on every aircraft.
We took the DM tour and then the Pima outdoor tour before making the rounds of the Pima hangars. All were excellent. This is a picture of a line of shrink wrapped F-16s at DM. Actually, that white stuff is a latex paint that covers and protects the aircraft. Note that there are many lines and many rows of F-16s, and KC-135s, and C-130s, various helicopters and many other military aircraft.
This tour takes place entirely from within a bus as the DM facilities require security clearances which most of the folks on tour do not have. I won't put a pic of every aircraft we saw, but some of the more notable are included below.
F-18 Hornet fighter in Blue Angel airshow configuration. The F-18 is the air superiority and attack replacement for the F-14 Tomcat of Top Gun fame on the Navy's aircraft carriers.
F-15 Eagle remains our top air superiority fighter, but is being replaced by the F-22 Raptor as the high end of the Air Force's high / low strategy for fighter aircraft procurement. The F-35 is the lower cost, lower performance end of the strategy which is intended to be procured in much greater quantities, complementing the smaller number of more expensive F-22s. F-35s are replacing F-16s (see long line of shrink wrapped aircraft above) which was the low end of the fighter spectrum vice high end F-15s.
F-117 Nighthawk Stealth fighter (get it ;-). All the F-117s have now been retired as F-22s and (eventually) F-35s enter the Air Force fleet in numbers.
EF-111 Raven (an electronic warfare (EW) variant of the F-111 fighter and FB-111 bomber). This aircraft, although capable, was probably a mistake when the Pentagon tried to build an aircraft that was all things to all Services and all missions. F-111s and FB-111s were quite capable, but very costly to operate. The EF-111 was a terrific EW aircraft which was retired in favor of Navy EA-6B Prowlers which are now to be replaced by EA-18 Growlers.
B-1 Lancer bomber (also known as the "Bone", B One . . . ;-). This was originally to be a supersonic bomber with intercontinental range, but was scaled back to be a sub-sonic bomber with impressive carrying capabilities by the Carter administration. The B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is the primary attack bomber now owing mostly to its stealthy characteristics. The Bone does a lot of more conventional missions. Interestingly enough, B-52 Stratofortresses are still in the bomber mix. If DOD has its way, when B-52s are retired many years from now per current schedules, some of them will be over 100 years old.
If you look in the background of each of these pictures you see many more aircraft, but it's hard to grasp the scale of this operation.
After the DM tour we grabbed some lunch at Pima and hopped on a tram for Pima's outdoor tour. Again, I got way more pics than are reasonably shown here, but some of them follow.
Beech Starship. This one is interesting because it was an advanced composite aircraft that was years ahead of its time. Beechcraft only built about 50 but ceased production after getting hammered in the early 80s when civil aircraft production in general was suffering. Still, virtually all manufacturers from Boeing and Airbus to Cirrus and (as we saw in an earlier post) Cessna intend to produce composite aircraft in the future. For the Starship, however, great idea, horrible timing.
F-105 Wild Weasel. Another very interesting aircraft. Back in Vietnam an early solution to taking out Surface to Air Missile (SAM) sites was the hunter - killer concept. 105s would fly in the area of a SAM and prompt a missile firing. One 105 would then dive to attract the missile while another would target the SAM's attack radar with an anti-radiation missile (ARM) which would follow the radar emissions back to the site. Pretty gutsy stuff. EW aircraft would eventually replace this approach with active jamming and ARMs, and stealthy characteristics have added to the difficulty of being tracked and attacked by defensive missiles.
B-52 Stratofortress bomber. I've already talked about the big ugly fellow (BUF), but it is amazing just how versatile this bomber has been and continues to be. Originally designed to make it over the poles to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear bombs, it has been employed extensively with conventional munitions. It has immense range and carrying ability. Some of you who may recall the X-15 rocket plane back in the 60s will recall the X-15 was carried to high altitude under the wing of a B-52. If I recall correctly, the BUF you see above is the one that did this mission, and it still has the attachment under the right wing close to the fuselage.
B-58 Hustler. Now this is the bomber even fighter pilots admired. It was big, fast (Mach 2), and technologically advanced for its era. I was also based at Grissom AFB IN, close to Ann's hometown of Logansport. Ann still talks about the sonic booms they created. Unfortunately, while Hustlers were very capable (and prettier than BUFs according to Ann), they were expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, expensive to operate, and carried substantially less than its B-52 counterpart.
We also made it around to Pima's indoor facilities. Again, there are way more aircraft (and pics of same) than one could reasonably stuff in this post. There are a few that are special.
These first two are the SR-71, another amazing plane designed and built by Kelly Johnson of Lockheed's Skunkworks. Although the overall design is amazingly advanced, I still think the engines, as in all of aviation, were the key.
Most folks know the SR-71 was capable of flying very fast at very high altitudes, and to do this for incredible distances. Part of the answer to how they did this is what they did with the spike in the engine inlet. Jet engines even today need to operate with sub-sonic air. If one is going to go supersonic, one needs a spike or a plate in front of the engine inlet which diverts the shockwave to the leading edge of the inlet. What happens across the shock wave is the air gets denser and hotter and sub-sonic.
The SR-71 goes one better. At some point in the flight profile, the spike is drawn further back to trap the shock wave inside the cowling. This means the compressors can be turned off with a large increase in engine efficiency. Not bad for a bunch of guys with great engineering sense, imagination, and slide rules.
Next up is the F-4 of Vietnam fame, this one with the Thunderbirds airshow paint job.
From the same era, the Bell UH-1Huey.
Rounding out the DM outdoor tour, the F-14 Tomcat mentioned previously in conjunction with its replacement, the F-18 Hornet. No, they do not have a Tom Cruise dummy in the cockpit.
And finally, my personal favorite, the P-51 Mustang. Every time I hear how it takes a decade or more to design and build an aircraft, I think of the P-51. Designed and prototype delivered in 117 days, it became the preeminent fighter from the end of WWII to the early years of jets in the Korean War. Fast, agile, great range after getting the Rolls Royce Merlin engine somewhat later. 117 days.
Things may have gotten somewhat more complicated in recent years with advances in technology and increasing demands for efficiency, stealth, noise reduction, mission profile optimization, etc, but it makes you wonder. Ten years? Really? It would be interesting to learn how long it took to design the SR-71 or U-2. Ten years?
Well, a high speed pass by the DM Bx per Deb Lackey's suggestion, and another by the Commissary for some apples, and we're off to Premier. All was well -- oil changed, AD completed for another 50 hours. We topped off the tanks for the first time in a while and headed for Carlsbad NM and the Carlsbad Caverns.
More on that in the next post.
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