Airplane graveyard

Airplane graveyardShow more

This is Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, run by the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (309 AMARG). It’s home to some 4,400 aircraft, arranged over nearly 2,600 acres (10.5 sq km). Some look like they were parked only a few hours ago, others are swathed in protective coverings to keep out the sand and dust. Inside the facilities' hangars, other planes have been reduced to crates of spare parts, waiting to be sent out to other bases in the US or across the world to help other aircraft take to the air again. To those who work here, Davis-Monthan is known by a far less prosaic name, one more in keeping with the Wild West folklore from Arizona’s earlier days. They call it The Boneyard.
Davis-Monthan is not the only aircraft boneyard in the world, but it is by far the biggest. The climatic conditions in Arizona – dry heat, low humidity, little rain – mean aircraft take a lot longer to rust and degrade.
What’s more, underneath the top six inches of dirt topsoil is a clay-like sub layer called caliche. This extremely hard subsoil allows the planes to be parked in the desert without the need to construct expensive new parking ramps, according to the 309 AMARG.
Planes are expensive things to build and maintain, but even at the end of their flying lives they still have their uses. But it takes a lot of room – and a lot of money – to store these unused planes in the kind of hangars needed to keep them warm and dry. It’s much cheaper to store them in the kind of conditions found in Tucson. That’s the reason why many of the world’s biggest aircraft boneyards are found in the dry deserts of the south-western US.
But it’s not simply a case of landing a plane at Davis-Monthan, parking it in one of the rows and handing someone the keys. Many of the aircraft are considered inactive, but have to be able to be brought back into service if need be. That takes a lot of work.
All aircraft have their fuel tanks and fuel lines drained, and flushed with a light, viscous oil similar to that used in sewing machines to ensure all the moving parts are lubricated. Then they must have any explosive devices – such as the charges that activate ejection seats – safely removed. Then, any ducts or inlets are covered with aluminium tape and the aircraft are painted over with a special easily strippable paint – two coats of black, and a final white layer to help deflect the fierce desert sun and keep the aircraft relatively cool.
Aircraft are kept at various levels of restoration – some are kept in as close-to-working order as possible if they are deemed to be needed to fly at a later date, while others are partially dismantled. Some of the aircraft stored at Davis-Monthan include retired B-52 bombers, aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons. As part of strategic arms limitation treaties with the Soviet Union, the B-52s were stored with their wings removed and placed next to the plane – allowing Soviet satellites to verify that the bombers had been taken out of service.
Others are used for spare parts, with the components sitting in the aircraft until they’re needed. On site is a smelter, where some of the surplus aircraft are shredded and totally recycled.
And with the original assembly lines of most of these aircraft long-since mothballed, Davis-Monthan is home to some 400,000 piece of tooling and machinery needed to create specific aircraft parts. Aircraft all over the world, not just those flown by the US, contain parts from the base’s enormous stockpile.
Search : Vitor Hugo Lizardi Leonardi

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