| home | scribbles | pictures | racing | about | e-mail |
Visting ARC and Pima were the main reasons for my trip, but ARC turned out to be something of a disappointment, mainly because it's a bus tour. (Davis-Monthan is an active base and the Air Force can't have a bunch of tourists wandering around loose, so you meet the bus in a parking lot off-base.) This means that any photos have to be taken from a moving vehicle and you can't really investigate the aircraft at all. Still, the info dump we got from our guide (a captain) was pretty interesting, as was the inert 30mm round from an A-10's cannon that got passed around.
You will notice a lot of pictures of A-10s on the flight line. As you will undoubtedly figure out from this and other pages, the A-10 is one of my favorite aircraft.
 |
A couple of A-10s getting ready for a training flight. You can just make out a practice Maverick missile under the left wing of this aircraft. | Another pair of A-10s, a bit further down the line. Also getting ready for a flight. |  |
|
 |
A little engine maintenance. | The first pictures from ARC itself. Part of the veritable forest of B-52s. These appear to be a mix of "D" and "G" models. |  |
|
 |
An O-1E, what I believe is a D-21 Mach 3+ drone (carried by the SR-71), and an F-4. The point of this picture, though, are the tails in the background. There are so many F-4s at ARC that they would constitute the 4th largest air force in the world, all by themselves. | What used to be primary (T-33) and advanced (T-38) jet trainers in the USAF. |  |
|
 |
The 4th largest air force in the world... | A C-130 transport. When I was really gung-ho to fly in the USAF, I had a major hankerin' to fly the gunship version of this, the AC-130. |  |
|
 |
An OV-10. At least some of these have been armed with the 25mm Bushmaster cannon, the same found on the M2/M3 Bradley AFV. | Lots and lots and LOTS of B-52Gs... |  |
|
 |
Two of the A-10s we saw earlier had finally taken off. | An F-16 I hadn't spotted during the flight line tour takes off. LOUD! (Afterburner, which the subsonic A-10s don't have.) |  |
|
 |
Strictly speaking, I took this picture from the parking lot at Pima, but here are some A-10s landing back at Davis-Monthan. I TOLD you I liked A-10s... |
|