Message posted by JimK on March 04, 2004 at 5:26:55 PST:

The people at the Wings Over the Rockies Museum in Denver were kind enough to allow me to open up their FB-111A to look for parts corresponding to those I found in the the desert last year at the crash site of the unknown airplane in Tom Mahood’s “Hunt for 928” article.

One of the things I found in the desert was a test procedure plate for an early “Bite” (Built-In Test Equipment) of some sort of air conditioning or pressurization box. The plane in the museum has a perfect match. The box was made by Vapor Corportation but I still don’t know it’s exact function. However the museum people think they have a set of maintenance manuals tucked away somewhere that I can do some further research in.

I also found an ID plate for an APS-109 Radar Homing and Warning System (RHAWS). I expected it to be from a black box which was discontinued after the F-111A and later retrofitted even on those. The museum airplane had an ID plate on the inside of the skin panel that covers the air conditioning box above.

It is the antenna portion of the system so I am assuming the black box was updated but the peripheral parts like the antenna remained. The museum’s FB-111A was made a couple of years after the date of the F-111A that I think is the desert plane.

There were two circuit breaker ID plates that I did not match. One is for the “Nuclear Pwr Sta 4” circuit breaker. The other is for “Fuel Low Qty Caution.” The first of these is really the most interesting to me because it would seem to eliminate most earllier aircraft. Not many could carry four or more nukes except the large bombers and I haven’t found references to anything real large crashing in the area except a B17 and it certainly didn’t have any. There is also some sort of joystick looking switch but it may have been on a black box and most of those are missing from the museum’s plane.

None of this absolutely proves that it is an F-111A out in the desert or that it is specifically 66-032 as I suspect but is definitely leading in that direction. 66-032 was the plane that proved the tail surfaces were suddenly going in opposite directions due to weld failures. The crew survived to tell what happened and the plane hit in a relatively accessable spot. At the time it was still a very secret aircraft and several had mysteriously disappeared in Viet Nam but you could not search for or dissect a plane there.

Anyway another trip is planned for late March or early April and maybe I can get this site ID’d for certain.

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