Why Retired Aircraft are Stored in the Desert | Hacker News Reader

Why Retired Aircraft are Stored in the Desert

murderousmusings.blogspot.com

110 pointspatrickk38 comments

I'm surprised noone's pointed out the obvious - the US have obligations under stategic nuclear arms reduction treaties such as START I that compel the US to chop up B-52s, put the parts in the desert, and leave them there long enough to allow the Russians time to use satellite imagery to confirm they've been chopped up.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/START_I

"365 B-52Gs were flown to the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. The bombers were stripped of all usable parts, then chopped into five pieces by a 13,000-pound steel blade dropped from a crane. The guillotine sliced four times on each plane, severing the wings and leaving the fuselage in three pieces. The ruined B-52s remained in place for three months so that Russian satellites could confirm that the bombers had been destroyed, after which they were sold for scrap."

For the same reason, if you're in the market for a used car you should check your nearest desert-area craigslist (e.g. http://palmsprings.craigslist.org/). I learned this valuable tip from a college roommate who grew up restoring old cars in Indio, CA.

And stay the hell away from cars from anywhere near the coast. I got my first used car from a lady who had kept it on the Oregon coast, and the thing was consumed by rust. Got me to bike races though, and considering the price, it worked well for the time I had it.

Cars from areas with cold climate where roads are salted for ice and snow fare worse too. The extra corrosion that develops on fasteners generally increases the cost of repairs, and makes working on an older car a pain in the ass.

I bought my '74 Westy in AZ, which had been in storage for 20 years. Only dry rot to attend to, which is much easier than the dreaded rust.

The dry climate has another side-effect, of making it OK for collectors and car aficionados to drive their old cars around. It's not unusual in LA, away from the coast, to see '32 Fords ("deuce coupe") and classic hot rods from the 60s and 70s (like GTOs, Darts, and Impalas) being driven around casually.

Because dry, warm climates preserve many things well, including airplanes, evidently. Next...

Many things - that are not made of water. The reason it preserves these planes is a dearth of water; the desert sucks the water out of everything, which prevents rust and kills most kinds of life.

I'm curious about the rubber though- my experience has taught me that sunlight breaks down rubber. It doesn't fail, but it does begin to get hard and crack.

It seems to me that it's probably a situation similar to the "Ghost Fleet" where there is no real expectation that it can be brought back into service without a fairly significant refit.

I'm not a chemist, but from what I recall natural rubber is subject to (relatively) rapid corrosion by ozone and synthetic rubbers don't have this problem. The rubber used for tires on planes and cars is synthetic.

I don't feel like doing the research right now but obviously 'rubber' is an umbrella term if natural and synthetic rubbers have different properties.

I believe that with synthetic rubbers, it is less of a problem. This was exactly where I got my experience with; old car and motorcycle tires, particularly tires that had been left out in a baking junkyard for a few years.

The dashboard of my 240Z agrees.

Somewhat relatedly the compund bow never took off much in western Europe though it survived well into the introduction of firearms in central and east Asia. The reason being that in the former climates the glues used in the bows would break down, whereas in the latter climates the bows would last indefinitely and could be passed down through generations.

on April 4, 1943, the Lady Be Good and 24 other airplanes took off from Soluch Airstrip in Libya to bomb the port at Naples, Italy

Hmm. Well history didn't just repeat itself, it reversed itself this year eh?

History does indeed repeat itself. Look up 1986's Operation El Dorado Canyon (US bombing of Libya as part of the Cold War).

That's partly why the rebels have been somewhat resistant to accepting US help...

How difficult is it to visit some of these? I'd love to just walk around near these planes and see (and photograph) them from up close.

Apparently the Pima Air and Space Museum has tours. You have to stay on the bus while among the planes, no wandering around among the multimillion dollar war machines.

Unless you're the mythbusters, in which case you get to take your saw to them, shoot guns at them, and even blow them up.

A DC9 with no avionics or engines probably isn't worth many millions of dollars.

I've been to the one in Tucson. The boneyard tour is on a bus. In the museum hangars and outdoors there are examples of select airplanes where you can get up close. The SR71 is pretty cool.

Reminds me of a section in Richard Branson's book Losing my Virginity. He had just started Virgin Atlantic and was essentially the target of a smear campaign by British Airways. The future of Virgin was up in the air, more or less.

During all of this, BBC (or some other station) did a short documentary on the situation. They interviewed him at an airfield for retired planes, somewhere in the Southwest US. Quite the ominous setting.

(Can't find the exact quote anywhere, sorry)

There's a boneyard right outside the airport where Scaled Composites is located. Scaled is the company that invented and produces the tech of Virgin Galactic.

A great photo set of the bone yard: http://www.flickr.com/photos/telstar/sets/32971/

Coincidentally, I had the chance to visit the bone yard at Victorville recently while doing a photo shoot for a software project (I'll post a link in a month or two, once it becomes public--it's very cool). We had the chance to photograph these planes up close but were forbidden from sharing the photos, unfortunately. It is quite an eerie place, especially at dusk, which is when we were there.

Fantastic photos from Victorville:

http://www.airliners.net/search/photo.search?placesearch=vcv...

and Davis-Monthan:

http://www.airliners.net/search/photo.search?placesearch=KDM...

I remember driving past Davis-Monthan the first time I went to Tucson on business. Amazing.

Aerial maps view of Davis Monthan: http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=pbskp45rxh0y&lvl=16...

Makes me sad to see this, I've probably flown some of those in the pic.

You can take a bus tour of military boneyard in arizona from the Pima Air Museum close by. The whole northeast section of the property is the tooling and jigs for the B-2, if making more ever gets funded.

Sadly, the F-4 Phantom population there continues to dwindle as they are refitted to be unmanned missile test targets, which tends to blow them up.

There used to be a fair number of F-101s and F-102s, which were eventually refitted and had the letter Q prepended to their designations.

It's amazing that all of that could be destroyed by a little mercury which corrodes aluminum, it's fascinating.

I've often wondered why cold war spies didn't use mercury more often (there was one incident?) or at all to sabotage entire squadrons of aircraft. Now with composite materials it's not a problem.

If you're in Tucson, the Pima Air and Space Museum next to the Boneyard is worth a visit.

There's a Flash slideshow about the boneyard that was pretty popular when it first came out a decade ago, back when I was a wee web designer fresh out of college:

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/sleepingGiants/

It holds up really well, especially the audio interviews with the mechanics and ground crew about their feelings about these "sleeping giants".

My uncle has worked at the boneyard on and off for a long time. He mostly decommissioned radar systems out of B-52s and other things. The B-52s are really the prize there, as Uncle Sam plans on using them til 2040(!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress#Futu...

It's been a while, but I believe nearly all the boneyard B-52s are G models (or older). I'm not sure if any H models have made it, yet. H models are slated for operational use until 2040 at least. Pretty remarkable for airframes manufactured in 60-61. (Of course, the avionics, nav, radios, ecms, etc have been gone through several iterations since then). Anyone know if they're still using STRAT radar systems?

G models are (were) generally used for experimental purposes.

Satellite photos of Tucson boneyard http://bit.ly/airplane-boneyard

Satellite images: http://goo.gl/YydfK

Boneyard Hackfest 2012. See you there!

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