inigo88
Composite-lover
Dave, Mike is right. If you were in R-4808N, I think they would have been debriefing you for 48 hours straight about how you could never ever talk about it on an internet forum. 
For example, Nellis AFB fighter pilots flying in the Red Flag exercise in adjacent restricted areas are severely punished and immediately dismissed from the exercise if they so much as cut a corner of "the box" (the NE corner of R-4808N, R-4808A).
But for comparison:
Area 51 (i.e. "Homey" - KXTA)
Tonopah Test Range (KTNX)
Creech AFB (Indian Springs)(KINS)
If you go immediately west of Indian Springs there's also Desert Rock Airport (NV65), which serves the tiny off-limits town of Mercury, NV, owned by the Dept of Energy. Mercury was a staging area for the Nevada Test Site and had a population of over 10,000 back in the 1960s during the heyday of nuclear weapons testing there.
I also think he saw TTR. I'm a huge fan of the history of that whole area, but Tonopah Test Range has had a particularly interesting history: Starting in the late 1960s as the home of the Air Force's 4477th tactical evaluation squadron ("Red Eagles") which flew secretly acquired Russian MiG-17s, -21s and -23s against Air Force and Navy pilots (for more see the book Red Eagles by Steve Davies -- although I'm holding out for someone to write a book about the "Red Hats" when that information eventually goes public
). Then around 1982 the HAVE BLUE and YF-117 stealth fighter program was moved from Groom Lake (which was too secret to field a large squadron of stealth fighters) to TNX, the runway was extended and the 4450th Tactical Group was founded as the first operational F-117 stealth fighter squadron. As of 2005 the base now houses the 30th Reconnaissance Wing, which flies the Lockheed RQ-170 Sentinel UAV (aka "The Beast of Kandahar"). For a more complete history of the above check out the Tonopah Test Range Airport wikipedia page, which is surprisingly comprehensive.
I've been meaning to post this for a while and this seems like as good a place as any. Traditionally all these airports have minimal FAA NACO charting data. "KXTA" and "Homey Airport" was only discovered as the pseudo-official name for Area 51 because it made its way into some Honeywell publication and GPS databases (Honeywell says they got it from Jeppesen - there's a good Air Force Times article on it from 2008). Creech AFB has an airnav page but no airport diagram or instrument approach procedures are on file in the FAA NACO charts (they obviously exist, but are in the DoD FLIP IFR Supplement or some other source unavailable to civilians). Tonopah Test Range was the same way, and about five years ago or so it appeared on the Las Vegas sectional as a magenta runway (un-towered) with an elevation and no other info (the base always had a control tower, which uses the callsign "Silverbow" after the nearby Silverbow mining ghost town). Revisiting the Tonopah Test Range airnav page recently, I was shocked to see that sometime in the last two years FAA NACO quietly got their hands on all the IAPs, DPs and Airport Diagram for TNX and began publishing them.
Airnav doesn't have the airport diagram yet, but it shows up in the back of the SW Airport Facility Directory and you can find it on the FAA NACO d-TPP site by searching ID: "TNX."
Will probably seem like minutiae to some, but I thought it was cool that details of this very historically significant base are slowly slipping into the "white" world.
For example, Nellis AFB fighter pilots flying in the Red Flag exercise in adjacent restricted areas are severely punished and immediately dismissed from the exercise if they so much as cut a corner of "the box" (the NE corner of R-4808N, R-4808A).But for comparison:
Area 51 (i.e. "Homey" - KXTA)
Tonopah Test Range (KTNX)
Creech AFB (Indian Springs)(KINS)
If you go immediately west of Indian Springs there's also Desert Rock Airport (NV65), which serves the tiny off-limits town of Mercury, NV, owned by the Dept of Energy. Mercury was a staging area for the Nevada Test Site and had a population of over 10,000 back in the 1960s during the heyday of nuclear weapons testing there.
TTR (KTNX) is far NW of Creech up Hwy 95. TTR is truely in the middle of nowhere. Creech has the tiny town of Indian Springs next to it, which can be unnoticable. Coming from the NW from Tahoe or Carson City, it's plausible you could see TTR in the distance, but you can fly right next to KINS.
Either way, they all have that equally creepy look to them, being in the middle of nowhere!
I also think he saw TTR. I'm a huge fan of the history of that whole area, but Tonopah Test Range has had a particularly interesting history: Starting in the late 1960s as the home of the Air Force's 4477th tactical evaluation squadron ("Red Eagles") which flew secretly acquired Russian MiG-17s, -21s and -23s against Air Force and Navy pilots (for more see the book Red Eagles by Steve Davies -- although I'm holding out for someone to write a book about the "Red Hats" when that information eventually goes public
). Then around 1982 the HAVE BLUE and YF-117 stealth fighter program was moved from Groom Lake (which was too secret to field a large squadron of stealth fighters) to TNX, the runway was extended and the 4450th Tactical Group was founded as the first operational F-117 stealth fighter squadron. As of 2005 the base now houses the 30th Reconnaissance Wing, which flies the Lockheed RQ-170 Sentinel UAV (aka "The Beast of Kandahar"). For a more complete history of the above check out the Tonopah Test Range Airport wikipedia page, which is surprisingly comprehensive.I've been meaning to post this for a while and this seems like as good a place as any. Traditionally all these airports have minimal FAA NACO charting data. "KXTA" and "Homey Airport" was only discovered as the pseudo-official name for Area 51 because it made its way into some Honeywell publication and GPS databases (Honeywell says they got it from Jeppesen - there's a good Air Force Times article on it from 2008). Creech AFB has an airnav page but no airport diagram or instrument approach procedures are on file in the FAA NACO charts (they obviously exist, but are in the DoD FLIP IFR Supplement or some other source unavailable to civilians). Tonopah Test Range was the same way, and about five years ago or so it appeared on the Las Vegas sectional as a magenta runway (un-towered) with an elevation and no other info (the base always had a control tower, which uses the callsign "Silverbow" after the nearby Silverbow mining ghost town). Revisiting the Tonopah Test Range airnav page recently, I was shocked to see that sometime in the last two years FAA NACO quietly got their hands on all the IAPs, DPs and Airport Diagram for TNX and began publishing them.
Airnav doesn't have the airport diagram yet, but it shows up in the back of the SW Airport Facility Directory and you can find it on the FAA NACO d-TPP site by searching ID: "TNX."
Will probably seem like minutiae to some, but I thought it was cool that details of this very historically significant base are slowly slipping into the "white" world.
