For years, whenever I’d drive on the 15 near Victorville, I’d see a twin-engine airplane sitting just off the west side of the freeway, off Stoddard Wells Rd. (I’m not well-versed on light twins, so I don’t know what kind it was.) Who owns this plane, sitting in the middle of the desert? I assumed that it belonged to a mining company or an oil company. I wondered why it was always there, and how often it flew, and what it was used for.
Well, I decided to look for it on google; and I discovered that it sits at Osborne Airport, a private strip. On the other side is J.L. Osborne, Inc., which manufactures tip tanks for Beechcraft Bonanzas. So now, after many, many years, I know why there’s an airplane out there.
Why the company is based in the middle of nowhere… I suspect the land is cheap, and some people like living in the desert.
As long as this thread is mundane and pointless (per the OP), I can’t resist throwing in this page with several pictures of an old WWII plane, apparently not really in flying condition any more.
This is on Elm St. (the old Hwy 41) in Easton (not Caruthers, as stated on this page) just south of Fresno.
ETA: Okay, just looked at Google maps. It might be in/near Caruthers after all.
Off of the highway to Quonset, there’s a fuselage of what looks like one of the early USN carrier jets, just sitting on a trailer bed. I can’t exactly identify it… but browsing through wiki, I’d guess it’s a F9F Cougar/Panther, or maybe a F2H Banshee. I’ll have to take a closer look at the tail the next time I pass it, to better identify it. My WAG is that there’s some relation between the fuselage and the old naval air station, but it’s just sitting in the middle of what looks like Jim Bob’s Quality Used Semis and Scrapyard.
A few weeks ago, going to a shooting (TV kind of shooting!) here in Bangkok I saw the entire front section of a 747 fuselage between the regular houses and shops along the road. When we got closer I saw that it had been turned into a restaurant.
Airline food, yummy…
If you want to eat in an airplane, try The Airplane Restaurant (formerly Solo’s) next to the Colorado Springs airport. They’ve outfitted the interior of a KC-97 with diner tables, and you can go sit in the cockpit if you like. Unfortunately the flight engineer’s station was removed to make way for the drinks station, though.
You can no longer have a drink in the Connie at Flannery’s Constellation Lounge in Penndel, NJ, though. It’s closed and the plane was/is being restored for a museum.
I once went to an estate auction on a property in Alaska, and there was a fuselage of a Lockheed Constellation for sale. I forget what it went for, but it was close to aluminum scrap price. Would have made a cool RV, mounted on a truck chassis.
The only remaining Boeing 307 Stratoliner, other than the one at the Smithsonian, is Howard Hughes’ former private transport - now converted to a Fort Lauderdale party boat called the Cosmic Muffin.
Well while we’re talking about planes in odd places, I have to mention the big ass plane on top of the water park near where I live. I’m not sure if it’s any sort of impressive plane, but I know the building right next to it houses the Spruce Goose.
Liberty Field was used by the Army Air Corps in the mid-1940s, and was located west of Sierra Highway between Ave. B and Ave. C in Lancaster, CA.
In the 1950s, U.S. Rubber built a test track on the site. To give you a sense of scale, the lettered streets (e.g., Ave. B and Ave. C) are one mile apart. You can still see the runways. Pretty rugged tire testing there!
Part of one of the runways has been paved in fairly recent years, apparently for use by radio control airplane flyers.
Today the lower part of the test track and part of one runway have been built over. I’m not sure what those are. My first guess is that they’re sewage treatment ponds, or else catch basins.
We always hear, ‘The desert is fragile’. It ain’t the Nazca Plain, but it’s interesting to me that marks made in my old stomping grounds are still visible three wuarters of a century after they were made.
There’s quite a few old RAF/USAF airfields in the county where I have a cottage (Suffolk, England).
Some are still very obvious from the either the air or the ground such as the one nearest to me; RAF Bentwaters.
Others are only really visible from the air, and otherwise would go unnoticed as just field boundaries and tracks in the farmland, such as RAF Raydon. If you can’t make out the airfield from that image, try comparing it to the Wikipedia one from 1946.
When driving once from Montreal to Lake Champlain, I passed an intact B-47 Stratojet set up as a memorial alongside the highway in northern New York State, but I can’t for the life of me remember what town it was just outside of.
This was in 1988; sad to think it may be gone now.
I remember a B-17 sitting in front of a strip mall in the early 70’s (I think it was Stockton, CA). You could climb inside of it; but I was afraid of getting in trouble (always regret that and my brother never let me forget it.)
A couple of older kids were inside, hitting the rudder pedals. Hearing the rudder hit the stops with a “wump”…“wump”…“wump”.
