(That now-deleted message was by me, not Patrick. Reposting now to get the attribution right.)

I drove through the boneyard ... good grief, that was more than twenty years ago. I remember it as strange and spooky, and at moments beautiful.

It helped that I went there with my friend Tim Kyger, a former Air Force brat who loved the old planes and could call each model off by name, with running commentary about their crotchets and virtues. Seeing it through his eyes staved off any creeping post-apocalypse blues.

As Tim explained it to me, Davis Monthan originally began mothballing planes because they could. I got the impression -- perhaps incorrect -- that the boneyard didn't start out as a formal project. It was just a good place to stash old airplanes that might otherwise get junked because the Air Force no longer had hangar space for them. The desert there is flat, dry, and firm -- you can see from the aerial photos that most of the boneyard's unpaved -- and the planes will keep there as well as they would anywhere that's out of doors.

The wingtip-to-wingtip bombers are the most striking feature when you're looking at it from the air. When you're up close and on the ground, there's all kinds of weird old interesting stuff that Air Force personnel couldn't bear to get rid of.

AMARC also store civil airliners, but the most common place for those is Mojave Airport, CA (MHV) -- http://www.mojaveairport.com/

The current gag amongst airline employess (and I've even seen T-shirts) is that United and American are opening a new "Super-Hub" at MHV, which is why all thier planes are flying there.

Commerical A/C don't sit in the desert like Military A/C do. Most are sold, parted out, or scrapped in a relativly short time. There are a few, though, that just sit. Rugged planes end up as freighters (see the UPS DC-8s and the FedEx DC-10s.) Not-so-rugged planes end up, well, as soda cans.

At AMARC, one of the things they do is SALT compliance. Part of the SALT treaties limited the number of long range bomber we could have. We had to destroy them in a manner that was provable "by national technical means." That last is fancy talk for "Satellites."

So, old B-52s fed into the SALT maw would be chopped into a few peices by a 18,000 lb. guillotine, and left lying in the desert for three months, so the Russian sats could have a look-see. Then, they'd be salvaged for metal. Of course, this didn't leave much for spare parts, so now AMARC is trying out just cutting them apart, sealing the sections, and leaving them out for the cameras, then salvaging parts.

Remember: Most of the B-52s flying today are older than thier pilots. There's a reason they call them "A mass of spare parts, flying in loose formation."

Edited by author 01-07-2003 10:39 AM
Oh, yeah. Here's MHV's storage area from 1994 -- it's much busier now, and a closeup. The row of larger A/C on the left look like DC-10s, though they might be L-1011s. The smaller A/C above them, and the bunch behind them (center pic) look like DC-9-10s and DC-9-30s, with three DC-9-50s or MD-80s at the back of the back, twoard the right. In the "box" at the lower right, they're breaking apart aircraft -- looks like a couple of C-135s are in there, as well as a DC-9 and a Gulfstream type. Above, in the smaller box, sits a Boeing 707.

(Edited to fix 2nd URL)

David Mercer's message (/m7) reminded me of this thing I've read about
several times in nerves (one was mentioned in boingboing). Nerves will
show a "readiness potential" to fire a half second or so before a
concious choice is made to move a muscle.

The repainting of the planes prior to war being announced sounds like
the same thing.

Don DeLillo has a remarkable passage about this place in his novel Underworld.

Do you know were I can get a photo of a B-25

Do you know where I can find two grounded Dc-3's they will
never be flown. Do not need engines or radio equipment.
Can be reached at timandamy@aczonline.net

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