It’s election day here in the States. My way of avoiding anxiety-inducing news and social media is to stay busy with something else: namely, a visit to Pima Air & Space Museum, a long session of photo editing, and now, as the time for early projections approaches, the task of putting together a blog post.
I was a docent at Pima Air & Space for almost ten years, leaving in February 2020, two weeks before the Covid pandemic forced the museum to close its doors. When the museum re-opened later that year, it did so without its former volunteer staff. These days I’m a mere member, no longer a docent. Since the re-opening, I drop by every spring and fall to photograph new exhibits and share them with you here. This time I had specific targets: two foreign delta-winged fighters, a Saab Draken and a Dassault Mirage; two versions of Lockheed’s venerable P-3 Orion; finally, the museum’s B-52A mothership, back on display after a long visit to restoration, now mated to an X-15 (sort of).
I’ll lead off with something I’m proud of: a more svelte version of myself, almost 40 pounds lighter than I’ve been in years, here posing with a background object for scale:
Checking the dates of photo albums from previous PASM visits, I can’t help noticing how my fall visits are gradually slipping toward winter: from September 2021 to October 2022, from October 2023 to November 2024. Southern Arizona summer heat is lasting longer and longer. It was worth the wait this year, because today’s conditions could not have been more pleasant, sunny and bright but cool enough for a flannel shirt. If you’re planning a visit to Tucson and the Pima Air & Space Museum, make it early in the spring or late in the fall … with more than 80 acres of outdoor exhibits to see, you’re definitely going to want cooler weather.
Now on to the planes I wanted to see today, starting with the Draken. This one’s an RF-35 photo reconnaissance version, once assigned to the Royal Danish Air Force’s Eskadrille 729. The Danes were still flying Drakens (Swedish for dragon, also kite) in the early 1980s when I flew F-15s out of Soesterberg Air Base in the Netherlands, but I never managed to see one in the air. In fact this is the only Draken I’ve seen in the flesh.
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Parked alongside the Draken is the museum’s new Dassault Mirage. This one’s also a photo reconnaissance variant, a Mirage IIIRS, and was assigned to the Swiss Air Force’s Fliegerstaffel 10. I saw lots of Mirages during my days in NATO (and down in Australia too) and always thought it was one of the prettiest fighters in the business. The wire spikes on the pitot boom in the first photo, by the way, didn’t come with the jet … the museum put them there to discourage birds looking for a place to perch.
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The Lockheed P-3 Orions are in the back lot, a little-trafficked area of the museum. The Orion in the top two photos has been on display for a few months now. Because of the long magnetic anomaly detection “stinger” on its stern I suspect it was a US Navy asset before being allocated to US Customs and Border Protection. The radar dish antenna on top would be useful in detecting airborne drug runners, but the MAD was made for hunting submarines (well, come to think of it, drug runners use those too).
The bottom photos show a US Navy EP-3 Aires II Orion that was only added to the museum’s collection a week ago, surprisingly in pristine condition and ready for immediate public display. This particular aircraft co-starred in the tense international Hainan Island incident of April 2001, when an intercepting Chinese J-8 flew too close and collided with one of its propellers, destroying the fighter and killing its pilot. The damaged Orion was forced to land on Hainan Island, where the Chinese detained its 24-man crew for 11 days. The disassembled Orion was eventually returned to the US where it was rebuilt and continued flying reconnaissance missions for the Navy until it was retired earlier this year. [link]
I’m disappointed not to see a kill mark under the cockpit of the Hainan EP-3. If the Navy was too chickenshit to do it, at least the museum should. C’mon, what’s Chairman Xi gonna do about it, invade Taiwan?
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Finally, the exhibit I most wanted to see and photograph today: Balls Three, out of restoration after eight long years and back on display, this time with the museum’s X-15 mockup, once a free-standing exhibit in the space gallery, mounted on the launch cradle under the mothership’s right wing. The two together make for a very impressive display, and I have to say the X-15 mockup is convincing enough that most visitors won’t realize it’s not the real thing. So good to see Balls Three* back on display!
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*Balls Three gets its nickname from the aircraft’s tail number, 52-0003. It was the third production B-52 built for the USAF in the early 1950s, and one of two B-52 motherships used to launch X-15s and other experimental aircraft at Edwards AFB.
Photographing parked aircraft at eye level can result in a lot of boring shots. If you’re wondering how I managed to get a little elevation on some of these photos, this one gives the game away:
The photos in this post, plus a bunch of others I didn’t share here, have a home on Flickr. Click here to see ’em bigger & better.