Nevada Test Range

[HarvardIV]

Hello Folks:

To continue from the China Lake discussion;
a guy from work told me about the Nevada Test Range, north of Las Vegas. I've heard there are a lot of old planes out there, and nobody ever talks about it. Anyone know anything?

[Cvairwerks]

NTS is also the only place in the US that they WILL shoot you without question for getting off the pavement in many areas. No warnings and no hesitation. Only place that I've ever been that someone as low ranked as a team Sgt. has the ability to whistle up armed fighters and give them free fire authorization. Let's put it this way, rules violations will get you dead, no questions asked and no tears shed.

What ever aircraft are out on the ranges would require millions of dollars of work simply to be decontaminated enough to move off the ranges, and I'll leave it at that.

[tom d. friedman]

i've heard that area 51 has the same shoot on sight policy.

[Randy Haskin]

Okay, guys, this is one area I have a lot of experience. I was stationed at Nellis AFB as a maintenance officer back in '95-'98 and I have been back there flying over the ranges numerous times since. I have seen the majority of the range both from the air and certain places from the ground.

First off, you have to discount any thoughts of weird stuff going on, shoot-on-sight policies, and the like. Yes, there are areas where they do classified work up there, and they are off-limits (even to us normal military schmoes) but I can tell you that they don't have some big stash of warbird hulks out there like you see at China Lake (more on that later), so there is no reason you'd need/want to go there anyway.

I don't really know of anything up on the "normal" ranges (that is, the 70-series bombing ranges just south of the Tonopah area and north of Pahute Mesa) that has any real warbird value. The targets out there to bomb are mostly ground stuff -- trucks, tanks, trains, freight containers simulating buildings, etc. There is one target complex called "Korean Airfield" that seems to have some swept-wing F-84s and some other junk there, but nothing piston-powered. Other than that, I have been all over that range complex (both flying and on the ground) and I have yet to see tons of airplane hulks *anywhere*.

I have seen the NTTR (that is, Nellis Training and Test Range) junkpile, where they dump all the stuff that is bombed out after replacing it with a new target. The only airplanes that were there were two F-4s that had been shot up.

Even the Nevada Test Site (NTS), where the Department of Energy performed nuke tests (that is on the south end of the range complex, roughly bordered on the north end by Pahute Mesa and by highway 95 to the west and south), doesn't have a bunch of that stuff sitting around that I'm aware of or that I have seen with my own eyes.

The reason China Lake had so many aircraft out there is that it was the primary weapons testing location, so they needed lots of targets and a wide variety of them. Nellis is simply a place where normal military guys go to blow things up...not a lot of *weapons* testing going on there, but there is of course tactics development going on there and whatever they do at the "Operationg Location Near Groom Lake, Nevada" (which is generally not going to involve kinetic weapons testing, either).

So, bottom line on this is that I don't see the NTTR yielding any warbird artifacts of significance. This isn't some Air Force party line...just my opinion as a warbird freak who has been there. Remember, I'm the guy who had a sh*t-fit when one of my squadronmates blew up a Sea Fury over in Iraq in '03....so I do care!

[airnutz]

Yeah....I'm stil heavin' after reading your account of the moment the
Sea Fury died!..."What did ya' do that for"???!!! When I told it to my
friends...I started out, saying..."I just read an account of the Last
Operational Loss of a Sea Fury!"..they said..."So"? I said..."It was in
Iraq, last year"!!! well..on we went....

[Cvairwerks]

Randy: When I worked on NTS in the early '80s there was a very definative shoot on sight policy in effect. That was the first thing REECO breifed us on when we signed in the first day. At that time most roads were posted every couple of hundred yards with signs stating the shoot first policy.They said something to the effect: "This is a no stopping area. If your vehicle breaks down, do not park off the pavement. Vehicles found off the pavement will be destroyed without question upon sight." We had certain areas that when we need to go in, we had to coordinate with security to keep from getting blasted because we were not on paved roads in those areas. It was a rare day that we were not buzzed by a pair of armed F16's or helo's or checked by a security team the whole time I was there. The sites we were working on and in were not in any of the bombing ranges or any of the blast ranges, although one site is now highly classified. Let's say that it was an interesting place to work in at that time. I left the project and the compnay that I was working for a couple of weeks after the NTS crew got hurt when a nuke test managed to suck their monitoring trailers into the blast crater.

[HELLDIVERS]

HI THERE WERE SEVERAL WW2 A/C USED IN THE STRUCTURAL TESTS OF THE 50S.IF YOU HAVE SEEN B 17 909 YOU ARE LOOKING AT ONE OF THE SUVIVORS. IT SURVIVED 3 NUKES ALONG WITH SEVERAL P-47S,B-45S,F-86S,ECT THE AIR FORCE MUSEUM HAS PLANS TO RECOVER THE XF-99 STILL SITTING AT THE BLAST SITE.MOST EVERYTHING ELSE WAS SCRAPPED AT THE SAME TIME THAT THE 2 B17S WERE REMOVED.I DONT THINK MUCH ELSE IS LEFT THANKS MIKE