What happens when an aircraft is no longer needed? In the desert dry of
the south-western US, vast ‘boneyards’ are homes to thousands of
aircraft, Stephen Dowling writes.
If you find yourself driving down South Kolb Road in the Arizona city
of Tucson, you’ll find the houses give way to a much more unusual view;
rows of military aircraft, still and silent, spread out under the
baking desert sun. On and on, everything from enormous cargo lifters to
lumbering bombers, Hercules freighters and the F-14 Tomcat fighters made
famous in Top Gun.
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.
An aerial view of Davis-Monthan, including partly disassembled B-52 bombers (SPL)
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. Broken bombers
The Boneyard’s workers have an exhaustive checklist. Any planes that
have served on aircraft carriers have to be thoroughly washed to get rid
of corroding salt. 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.
Jets like these F/A-18s may be used to provide spare parts to keep other aircraft flying (US Air Force)
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. Post-Soviet boneyards
“As
long as there are aircraft flying, military and commercial aircraft
boneyards will always be necessary to keep other planes in the air,”
says aviation author Nick Veronico, who has visited Davis-Monthan as
well as the Mojave facility and other boneyards in the desert states.
After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster,
irradiated Soviet helicopters like this Mil Mi-6 were stored in a giant
boneyard (Phil Coomes/BBC)
“Each of the storage yards typically performs a
variety of functions from storing aircraft that are temporarily out of
service but expected to return to the fleet, to reclaiming useable parts
which are inspected, overhauled, and then held until needed by active
aircraft, to dismantling of the aircraft carcasses. These functions go
hand-in-hand and are part of the lifecycle of an aircraft.
“I have
flown on aircraft that have gone to the boneyard and provided parts to
the fleet,” he says. “I’ve had the opportunity to watch parts being
removed from a plane, and then having flown on an aircraft flying with
salvaged parts – the exact parts I saw being removed, preserved, and
installed.”
There are boneyards in Russia that contain some of the
old Soviet Union’s military aircraft, but it’s fair to say the aircraft
here are not in any fit state to return to the skies. The former bomber
base at Vozdvizhenka, some 60 miles north of Vladivostok in far-eastern
Russia, used to be home to Soviet supersonic bombers. After the end of
the Cold War the aircraft were surplus to requirement – and simply left
where they were parked. The once-secretive base in now abandoned, and
this ghostly bomber fleet now poses for photographers who clamber
through the rusted fences.
At Mojave Airport, more than 1,000 airliners ended up in the California desert after their flying days (Getty Images)
Another post-Soviet boneyard is in the Chernobyl
Exclusion Zone – the area evacuated after the 1986 nuclear disaster in
Ukraine. The vehicles used to help clean up the disaster area were
contaminated with radiation. A line of giant Soviet helicopters has been
left to rust in the fields. BBC News pictures editor Phil Coomes
visited the site in 2006, on the 20th anniversary of the disaster.
“After the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, many of the contaminated
vehicles used in the clean-up operation were placed in graveyards in the
vast exclusion zone around the reactor. Some remain there today,” he
says. “The largest graveyard, Rassokha, [is] where the remains of
helicopters, military and civilian vehicles and fire engines are slowly
rusting away. It’s a vast site, but over the years parts have been
reclaimed for spares but contamination levels vary, so souvenir hunters
would be wise to keep away.” Despite the danger of radiation poisoning,
many of the helicopters have been stripped of useful parts; their
skeletal remains dwindle with every passing year.
In eastern
California, Mojave Airport carries out a similar role for civilian
aircraft that have reached the end of their operational lives. Airliners
have been flown here for decades, and stored in the dry desert heat
until broken up for scrap.
Some aircraft end their days being hacked
to pieces to be sold as scrap, like these Russian-built Ilyushins in
Belarus (AFP/Getty Images)
“Driving across California’s high desert, the
airliner boneyard at Mojave airport is visible from miles away,” writes
aviation photographer Troy Paiva, who photographed airliners here in the
1990s and 2000s before security concerns made it a no-go area. “The
long rows of faded tails seem to stretch to the horizon.”
The
Royal Aeronautical Society’s Keith Maynard says aircraft are less of a
headache to dismantle than other heavy transport. “I’m not sure how easy
an aeroplane is to dismantle, but what goes together comes apart, and
there’s a lot less heavy or dangerous materials associated with aircraft
than ships.” But as less and less recyclable metal goes into making
modern planes, the epic scale of the desert boneyards may be reduced.
“In the future, the use of composites may make life more difficult to
deal with final disposal, but there are industry protocols that are
addressing the issue. But bone-yard parking will still be useful when
demand fluctuates. Indeed, the numbers of parked airliners is often a
good sign of slump or recovery, and is monitored by analysts.”
Back
in Tucson, the long rows of planes at Davis-Monthan sit in the Arizona
heat. For some, the sun-baked desert is a kind of aviation retirement
home. For others, their flying days are not quite over. If you would like to comment on this article, or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook or Google+ page, or message us on Twitter.
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