During the 1970s (my schooldays and often in schooltime..), I became interested in military aircraft. I lived on cycling-distance of Soesterberg AB and often went there. When this interest developed into an intiative to spend a vacation cycling in the UK, from one air base to another, I gathered sufficient stock to start trading with a few correspondents.
One of these correspondents was Ben Knowles Jr., from Tucson, Arizona. He was a Master Sergeant in the USAF and traded in such a volume, which I frankly had difficulty in meeting. So we only traded a batch when I had gathered sufficient material to send him, which meant we exchanged letters infrequently and possibly only twice a year. In his letters he was brief and to the point, only referring to what was enclosed.
Early 2009 I learned Ben Knowles had passed away in 2008.
Since I found few photos by his name on the internet, I started digging among the remnants o fmy early start in aviation photography. Among a few hundred b&w negatives I found a selection which had been sent to me by Ben some 30+ years ago. As a tribute, I would like to showcase some of them.

I replied:
"Don't really know much about him; he was one of my earliest correspondents with whom I exchanged slides and/or photo negative of military airplanes.
That was over 30 years ago. After a few years when my interest in aviation declined to an extend I did not travel much for aviation photography any more, he decided to cancel the exchange as he did not like to exchange small (e.g. 15 quantities).
To me he came across as a bit gruff, very much involved in aviation photography and his collection. I tried to learn more about him while we wrote a few notes in the accompanying letters with the batch of photo material, but he volunteered very little.
He was retired I think, when we swapped material, as I seem to recall him signing his letters with ‘MSgt (ret.)’. But it could be that he retired during the time we wrote each other, in the 1970s mainly."

Ben Knowles was in an excellent position to photograph aircraft which had arrived for storage at the Military Aircraft Storage & Disposition Center (MASDC, later renamed AMARC). However, some of the aircraft on the ramp of Davis-Monthan AFB may have been operational visitors and as such I have referred to them in the information as 'DMAFB' instead of 'MASDC', relying blindly on the info I have with the negatives.

The negatives were scanned, using an Epson V500 flatbed photoscanner. Adobe software was used to enhance the results.

Davis-Monthan AFB on Wikipedia

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