Tonopah, NV airfield hangar (#1128)

Luckily when I first discovered Tonopah I also discovered the Tonopah Airport, the former Tonopah Army Air Field and subsequent Tonopah Air Force Base. What was most interesting to me was the remnants of a large military base that were still scattered around the large plot of land adjacent to the airport, and particularly the very large wooden hangars that were apparently built in the early 1940’s when the base was a training site for WWII bombing aviators.

The picture here is a composite of a picture taken in 2008 (link below) and a picture taken on this trip. The collapsed hangar in the larger picture isn’t the same hangar as the one in the inset, but all three (four?) of the hangars remaining at the airfield were similar in construction, thus it represents a fair comparison. Considering the deterioration of the older hangars, I suspect that what destroyed the hangar in the larger picture was simply a windstorm.

Though not depicted in this picture, I did notice some other changes around the Tonopah airport. When I had visited the airport in previous years, the existence of various industrial sites around much of the abandoned sections of the airport suggested that there was an effort to create an industrial park there. On this visit, it seemed that all of those industrial efforts had been removed.

2008 hangar: www.flickr.com/photos/donbrr/3138033248
Tonopah Air Force Base: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonopah_Air_Force_Base