Vintage aircraft in Arizona

The trip starts in Tucson at the Pima Air & Space Museum, which has a classic, walk-up entry for its 400-strong calf of civilian, commercial, and military aircraft and spacecraft, spanning decades of aviation history. The facility is on the south side of town, just off Interstate 10 at the Valencia Rd exit 267, with fall/spring-day hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with the last admittance at 3 p.m. Under the heat of summer, the hours drop to 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. — and weekends can be busy, when the museum fills up1,5[/REF].

That same Tucson stop is where the Arizona trip lands on its locked-down requirement: the AMARG/Davis-Monthan “boneyard.” The back story of aviation storage is well told, but the expansive site – stretching from Tucson International Airport down to Interstate 10 — is limited as a public tour stop. There’s no walk-up boneyard entry on a Sunday; the tours from Tucson are only via bus and only available from the Pima Air & Space Museum on weekdays, no weekends, no holidays3,12[/REF]. The museum does not list the waiting time, but the trip requires advance booking on weekdays. There’s no telling if you’ll get your slot before a Saturday plane spot, but the no-weekend rule is rock-solid.

The open-every-day tourist slot is then filled, after Tucson, by the Arizona Commemorative Air Force Museum in Mesa. The facility is on the campus of Falcon Field Airport, in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, and lists hours of Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.8,14[/REF], The key feature at Mesa is its robust World War II warbird hangar, with a far-flung collection of fighters, bombers, and fieldcraft from the 1940s. This is also the place to snap the iconic family photo in a vintage cockpit – or book a flight on the day. The two signature planes are a nostalgic B-17G Flying Fortress, “Sentimental Journey”, and a B-25J Mitchell named for the Steele family that manages the Mesa museum5,14[/REF]. The Commemorative Air Force museum is in Mesa, which hosts events featuring restored WWII aircraft. Phoenix hosts aviation events throughout the year, both also featuring major warbird exhibition flights5[/REF]. If your Arizona trip is catching Douglas, just shy of the New Mexico and Mexican border, call up – the town’s Border Air Museum is open by appointment, not on set days. That’s another example of surprisingly strict Arizona aviation-sightseeing avails; it’s only established that Mesa, Tucson, and Phoenix are the open-door places, even with the major boneyard exclusion5,14[/REF]. Some airplane fans will try to knock out bigger U.S. aviation stops in one blow – ranging the Pacific Northwest, for instance, or the East – and Arizona’s one-stop boneyard remains a snag on even the longest itinerary, accessible only on a tour, not a walk-up, and only planned for a weekday, not an outbound trip from Columbus, for instance, or the Concord-bound flight to Austin. Those disclosures can trip up the Southwest plan: the inbound of May’s hot-air balloon show landing at the former military base north of Phoenix, for instance, gives Mesa exactly one week, not an ad hoc Sunday in between flights12,14[/REF]. As far as the verified facts for Arizona aviation still go, you’ll nail a boneyard trip with a booking, not a drive-by — we know that AMARG is strictly a bus tour from PV to DMZ, and not a walk-up, and we know that Mesa’s “World War II Hangar” is a monument to military history, and not a World War I era site, as documented in its exhibits8,15[/REF]. Arizona’s hard slots are the weekday-only boneyard tours and the better-booking-established warbird flight engines at the AFM. Some aviation sites may have holiday closures1,5,12,14[/REF].