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airplane boneyard


bikeman564™

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22 minutes ago, maddmaxx said:

My baby is there, stripped for parts.  :(

So are most of the aircraft that I worked on. Some have been destroyed. A few, such as the military versions of the Sabreliner and DC-9s were sold to civilians and other country's military. The Aussies even bought a few F-111s but retired them about a decade ago. There were even Sabreliners that I worked on listed on EBay. 

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3 minutes ago, JerrySTL said:

So are most of the aircraft that I worked on. Some have been destroyed. A few, such as the military versions of the Sabreliner and DC-9s were sold to civilians and other country's military. The Aussies even bought a few F-111s but retired them about a decade ago. There were even Sabreliners that I worked on listed on EBay. 

There was only one ABL ever made.  It was a science project from the get go and after being the most expensive Air Force project ever it became obsolete before ever going into front line service.  The problem was that so much was learned during it's life that it became obvious that the knowledge would be best used in a fresh start.  It was designed to defend against a Desert Storm scenario, an airborne Scud killer.  The concept was pure Star Wars and many believed it to be impossible.  Nobody would ever shoot down a missile with a laser.

It worked.  They were wrong but technology passed it by and better became available.  Today, laser guns and beam weapons are no longer the stuff of tomorrow.

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1 hour ago, maddmaxx said:

There was only one ABL ever made.  It was a science project from the get go and after being the most expensive Air Force project ever it became obsolete before ever going into front line service.  The problem was that so much was learned during it's life that it became obvious that the knowledge would be best used in a fresh start.  It was designed to defend against a Desert Storm scenario, an airborne Scud killer.  The concept was pure Star Wars and many believed it to be impossible.  Nobody would ever shoot down a missile with a laser.

It worked.  They were wrong but technology passed it by and better became available.  Today, laser guns and beam weapons are no longer the stuff of tomorrow.

I remember seeing photos of it in Air Force Magazine. Wasn't there basically a large hole in the left side of it?

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10 minutes ago, JerrySTL said:

I remember seeing photos of it in Air Force Magazine. Wasn't there basically a large hole in the left side of it?

IMO that was the Laser Lab, a forerunner.  This was ABL  It started life as a 747 air freighter before conversion.  That's a 13 ton gun turret in the nose and the "caliber" is 1.5 meters.  :o   Everything behind 1st class is rearward of the "crew survival bulkhead" as the weapon laser is powered by some not so nice gas flow.  The belly of the plane was reskinned with a metal capable of withstanding the overboard gas dump when the weapon fired.

 

YAL-1A Airborne Laser unstowed crop.jpg

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