The AMARG Boneyard: Four Thousand Aircraft in the Desert

From the air, it looks like a parking lot for airplanes. More than three thousand aircraft arranged in precise rows across two thousand six hundred acres of alkaline desert, wing to wing, tail to tail, stretching as far as you can see. B Fifty-Two Stratofortresses. F Fourteen Tomcats. C One-Thirty Hercules transports. Aircraft that were flying over Korea and Vietnam, that carried presidents and launched missiles. Lined up in the Tucson desert, waiting.

The facility is called the Three Hundred and Ninth Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, AMARG, and informally it is known as the Boneyard. The Army Air Forces chose this location in nineteen forty-five for the same reason the desert has always drawn people who need to preserve things: low humidity, infrequent rainfall, alkaline soil, high altitude. Metal does not rust here the way it rusts in Georgia or Washington State.

That is the part that surprises people. The Boneyard is not just a graveyard. It is a library. Aircraft are parked here because the parts they contain are irreplaceable. When an active-duty aircraft needs a component that is no longer manufactured, a crew from Davis-Monthan walks the rows, finds the right airframe, removes the part, and sends it back into service. The facility returns roughly five hundred million dollars' worth of parts to military and allied customers every year. The entire supply chain for maintaining aircraft from wars that ended before some of these crews were born runs, in part, through this desert lot.

The Boneyard is on an active military installation. The Pima Air and Space Museum adjacent to the base offers walking tours that bring visitors to the fence line. Standing there, looking at thousands of aircraft parked in the Arizona sun, is one of the more unusual perspectives available on the last eighty years of American military history.