The Boneyard: America's Largest Aircraft Graveyard
Arizona
Just south of Tucson, spread across two thousand six hundred acres of Sonoran Desert, sits the largest aircraft graveyard on earth. They call it the Boneyard. What you're near right now is Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, and tucked behind its fence lines are more than four thousand retired military aircraft arranged in precise rows, wing to wing, stretching as far as the eye can see.
The Boneyard was born in nineteen forty-five, when the United States military found itself with thousands of surplus World War Two planes and nowhere to put them. By May of that year, more than six hundred B-twenty-nine Superfortresses and two hundred C-forty-seven Skytrains had already been moved here. Tucson was chosen deliberately. The desert air is extremely dry, which prevents metal corrosion, and the ground beneath the base is caliche, a rock-hard calcium carbonate layer that can support the weight of heavy bombers without concrete paving.
By nineteen seventy-three, as the Vietnam War wound down, the inventory hit its all-time peak: six thousand and eighty aircraft. Among the planes that came through was the Enola Gay, the B-twenty-nine that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, stored here before being transferred to the Smithsonian.
The facility has changed names over the decades. It was the Military Aircraft Storage and Disposition Center until nineteen eighty-five, then the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center, and today it operates as the three hundred ninth Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, or AMARG. The mission is not just mothballing. Planes are restored, cannibalized for parts, and occasionally brought back to active duty. During the Gulf War, dozens of A-ten Thunderbolts were pulled from the desert and returned to combat readiness in a matter of weeks.
Public bus tours run along the perimeter, offering a view few military installations allow. Row after row of F-fourteens, B-fifty-twos, and Cold War-era bombers sit silently in the desert sun. Some will fly again. Most will not.
