Edwards F-16D's at Moffett Field for flyover

So thanks to the 49'ers resurgence, the team gets more high profile games like MNF so more flyovers. A pair of F-16D's flew up Edwards a few days ago.

Interesting once of the tail codes is 848 which is the same as one of the F-16XL's

Return shots were bad as the light was horrible

a reply to: FredT
Any idea Fred if the F-16XL was the two seater? That would be serendipitous if it was.
Question? In a number of the shots you can see what looks like old airship hangars behind. I note they are uncovered, are they undergoing restoration and are to be re-clad or are they being demolished?

a reply to: FredT

The 848 code was given to the aircraft after it went to NASA. During the XL program with the military, it was 75-0747.

a reply to: thebozeian

It was. It started life as a single seat aircraft, 75-0747, FSD A-3. In August of 1980, it blew a tire on takeoff at the Edwards Air Show. The nose dug in on landing, and seriously damaged the forward fuselage and intake. It was sent to Fort Worth minus the cockpit and forward section, and was replaced with a two seat cockpit.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Thank you, we can always rely on you for the "skinny"

originally posted by: thebozeian
a reply to: FredT
Any idea Fred if the F-16XL was the two seater? That would be serendipitous if it was.
Question? In a number of the shots you can see what looks like old airship hangars behind. I note they are uncovered, are they undergoing restoration and are to be re-clad or are they being demolished?

That is Hangar 1, the hangar that was built to house the US Navy’s Macon airship back in the 1930s. It’s a little over 1100 feet long. Originally it was covered with Asbestos-containing sheets of siding. When the Navy moved all of its P-3 squadrons out of Moffett (back in the 1990s, as I recall) the airfield ceased being a Naval air station and became a federal airfield, with NASA ultimately becoming the anchor tenant. It was discovered that the hangar and its immediate surroundings was contaminated by Asbestos, lead, and chlorinated hydrocarbons. So it turned out that NASA owned the hangar but the Navy owned the clean up of the contamination. To make matters even more complicated, somewhere along the line, Hangar 1 was declared a national historic site. That means it can’t be simply torn down. So the Navy decided that the Asbestos siding had to come off, in any case, and so it did. But NASA didn’t have the money to replace the siding with something less toxic. In recent years, Google, which has billions of dollars sloshing around in their petty cash jar, signed a long term lease to re-cover the hangar framework in return for getting to use it for God knows what. Supposedly, it will be re-covered by about 2025.

a reply to: thebozeian

Looks like everything was covered above LOL