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Re: Look what they found in Chino...

Posted by Scott Thompson on Mon Mar 17, 2003 10:31:53 AM

In reply top Look what they found in Chino... posted by bdk on Sun Mar 16, 2003 10:15:35 PM

: And that was under some new taxiway construction adjacent
: to the runway. There never were rumors of entire airplanes
: though seeing that Chino (Cal Aero Field) was a site wher
: e they smelted aircraft. There are rumors of crated Alliso
: ns buried at Chino though.

Given that the airplanes at Chino were sold to a contractor for scrapping, it would seem improbable to me that anything of value was buried afterwards. The only things that were left were the bits and pieces of the airplanes as they were broken apart. This was true of the six major fields in the U.S.: Walnut Ridge, Kingman, Chino (Ontario), Altus, Stillwater, and Clinton. In many cases, how the airplanes were disassembled determined how many parts were left lying around. At Kingman, it is evident that the airplanes were pulled or pushed to the area where they were broken apart and smelted. At Stillwater, OK, they were cut up where they were parked and the parts moved and loaded onto railway cars, then sent to St. Louis for smelting. Lots of small parts have been found at Stillwater. (There is a museum at the airport terminal partly dedicated to the scrapping operation and has many small pieces of the airplanes displayed.)

I think the only place you might find buried airplanes in the U.S. is where the fields remained military well into the post-war period and then, perhaps, closed rapidly. Excess stores and/or unflyable airplanes may have been buried just to get rid of them.

This is interesting stuff to me. We did a book a few years ago entitled "Military Aircraft Boneyards" that covered the U.S. postwar scrapping. We never found any evidence of burying whole airplanes in the domestic U.S. in all the research done. Obviously a bit different overseas, with rumors of many P-38s buried at Clark Field and other airplanes at various Pacific islands. After looking at the parts that came out of the ground at Stillwater, any airplane so buried in similar soil wouldn't be good for much after nearly sixty years.

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