Aircraft Boneyard Dreams

Lockheed P-3 Orions in storage at AMARC, outside Tucson, AZ

I’m an aircraft fanatic, and like most of my ken, I’d really like to go to the Aviation Maintenance and Regeneration Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force base outside Tucson, Arizona. Over 4,200 aircraft used by the United States military over the past five decades or so can be found at this facility, which is perfect for storing aircraft because of the low humidity. Some of my favorite aircraft are stored there, and outside the boundaries of D-M AFB are scrap-metal dealers with the bones of even older aircraft in storage, ready to be melted down. There’s a museum there, too, the Pima Air Museum, with a lot of classic warbirds saved from the smelters, aircraft such as the F-4 Phantom, now being used as target drones, the first American swing-wing, the F-111, the OV-10 Bronco, the Guppy, and even the most beautiful airliner ever built, the Lockheed Constellation. I could probably spend a week there with my camera, and have fodder for thousands of posts. Meanwhile, I’ll have to content myself with our own Rhode Island Air Museum, which has a respectable collection, including a rare Vampire, which flew over my house the other day.