Edwards Air Force Base Abandoned Planes
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE | CALIFORNIA
I learned of some abandoned aircraft up in the high desert near Edwards Air Force Base and knew that I had to make the trip. I searched the web trying to find out more about them, whether they were on public property, if they were legal to get to or at least where they were located. I couldn't find much information on getting to them but I did learn some history.
There are two B-52s that were decommissioned, placed out on the south 40 and left unused for a lot of years. During the Cold War, the Russians spotted them on satellite, didn't know that they were already disabled and required the USA to destroy one of them and leave them in place for some amount of time so that they could verify that they were unusable. The Air Force decided to just leave them out there indefinitely. I am glad that they did because that meant that I could find them after zooming way in on Google Maps and panning all around the area that I thought they could be found. Once I located them, I made a plan to drive up there and see if I couldn't get close to them. I have found things on Google Maps that I want to access before, only to realize when I got to them that there is a fence or some other barrier to stop me.
I knew that I wanted to make it a night photoshoot and so I left LA around 11:00PM and made the 2-hour drive up to the south side of Edwards. I had pulled the location up on my phone and drove the road to a spot as close to the planes as I could get, parked the Jeep, packed my bags and headed across the desert in the middle of the night. It was about a mile or so in the darkness. Finally, the dark silhouettes appeared and I knew I had found the bombers' resting place.
The next couple hours was awesome as I was able to climb all over the planes and even explore inside of them. Just as the stories had said, one was completely blown into several pieces and the other was still mostly intact. The Milky Way was out so it made the pictures really special. The moon started to rise and with the long exposure photographs, it started to appear as the Sun was rising in some of the later pictures.
There was one other stop that I wanted to make. There is also a B-58 Hustler, nicknamed "Snoopy" out there that was a mile or so from the bombers. I was able to take some last photos of the plane and the stars before the moon made a mess of the sky. It was getting late and I was getting tired so I headed back to the Jeep to make the drive back to Los Angeles. I do hope that you enjoy the photos as I really enjoyed taking them.
