Tucson

Pima Air & Space Museum, Part 1

While in Tucson, I wanted to visit and sketch one of the best and biggest air museums in the west if not the entire United States, the Pima Air & Space Museum. This place is epic!

Now where to start?

What is impressive about the museum is the sheer size of the collection, not just in the number of aircraft in their collection (over 400) but the massive size of the planes including three B-52s, two B-29s, and two 747s. You need a lot of real estate to display these massive machines and they have it.

Two of the three B-52s in the museum’s collection.

What I also liked about the size and scale of the museum, unlike others I have visited, is that you actually have space to stand back and take in the whole aircraft and walk around them for a 360 degree view and they weren’t crowded in with tons of other aircraft, making sketching or plane viewing, rather difficult.

Getting a 360 view of the massive end of a Boeing B-52 (and they have three).

Some of the aircraft is displayed in hangers but the majority of the collection is outside under the desert sun.

The business end of an A-10 Warthog. This maybe one of the only museums where you can see this static plane, step outside and see one taking off at the adjacent Air Force Base.

Sketching outside was going to be a challenge in the desert sun for my coastal constitution and fair skin. I employed 45 SPF sunscreen, long sleeves, a buff, and a wide brimmed hat.

While sketching a line of some of the museum’s largest aircraft, two 747s, a DC-10, and a triple 7, I looked for shade in my sketching positions.

Luckily a Boeing 747 provides quite a bit of shade to sketch under. I rendered the scene with a continuous-line sketch (featured sketch).

In this post I included sketches of some of the museum’s largest planes, they all happen to be made by Boeing: the B-29 Superfortress, the B-52 Stratofortress and the 747, the world’s first jumbo jet.

While the B-52s and the 747s were outside, the heavy World War Two bomber, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress was indoors.

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress is known for the destruction it wreaked on Japan during WW II with the dropping of incendiary bombs on Japan’s wooden cities and also dropping the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that virtually ending the war in the Pacific Theater.

The Airplane Boneyard

High on my Tucson sketch list was the Airplane Boneyard east of downtown.

From the Pima Air & Space Museum’s website I learned that tours of the Boneyard had been discontinued since Covid (it is an active military base) and the only way to view the aircraft was from perimeter roads.

The Boneyard at Tucson is part of Davis–Monthan Air Force Base and contains over 4,400 aircraft on 2,600 acres. They use these retired aircraft for parts and also restore some back to service. This is the perfect spot for aircraft in the desert climate because the dry atmosphere does not induce rust or corrosion.

Using Google Maps I thought East Escalante Road would be a good place to start. I chose this road for two reasons: it ran parallel to the perimeter fence and it was close to one of my favorite airplanes: the Lockheed P-3 Orion.

This was the four turbo prop submarine hunter that was stationed at Moffat Field in my hometown of Sunnyvale, California. The plane that passed my bedroom window on final approach to the Naval Base. I can still hear the mighty roar of the turbo prop engines. The soundtrack of my childhood.

Apparently E. Escalante is one of those long Tucson streets and Google Maps led me not too close to the Boneyard. I closed Google Maps and found the location with instinct, cunning, and eyes.

After a short search I found the street and the location. I pulled off on a side street near a backyard with two very protective dogs in the yard. Now it was time to find a good sketching location.

P-3s use the same engines as the C-130 but the props of the Orion are rounded.

Escalante was a busy street even at 7:45 in the morning. I crossed the road like a roadrunner and walked along a parallel bike path to a picnic shelter.

The bike path and fence with more P-3s than I have ever seen in one place.

I sat on a table and started my sketch. There was a lot going on in front of me! I chose to not include the chain link perimeter fence in front of me.

In the foreground are rows and rows of P-3s all parked with military precision with purple peaks in the background. This is the most P-3s I’ve ever seen in one location and I wondered if any of them were stationed at Moffett. The answer: very probable.

Rows and rows of Lockheed’s C-130s.

I returned to a different part of the Boneyard a few days later on my way to Saguaro National Park. This time the road that paralleled the Boneyard was East Irvington Road.

There are a lot of P-3s here. The plane closest is actually an EP-3 Aries II.

At this location, the aircraft were parked parallel to the fence and the tails receded into the distance towards the mountains in the horizon. This would be good for a sketch. The two types of aircraft near the fence were the Lockheed C-130 and P-3. Both of these turboprop planes had long years of service both in the United States and around the world. These planes are still flown today.

Now some of these planes are just expensive pigeon perches.

For this sketch I sketched across the gutter with a continuous-line sketch. And on this spread I did sketch in the fence.