The Airplane Graveyard - Bone Yard - Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center
Just outside Tucson, Arizona in the Sonora Desert is the famed Airplane Graveyard-Bone Yard at Davis Monthan Airforce Base. The Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center AMARC is where the U.S. Air Force mothballs planes until they either need them again or it's time to salvage them for parts. Whenever the U.S. sells surplus planes to foreign governments part of the sales pitch is that there will always have a ready supply of spare parts. Some are turned into pilotless drones and used for missile target practice.
The Airplane Graveyard, is not just a fence around piles of out dated scrap metal, millions of dollars of surplus parts are salvaged to keep other active aircraft flying. You can think of this place as a huge warehouse for all types of spare parts which saves taxpayers millions of dollars every year. Many people think the government sells flying airplanes to the general public, this is not true. Anything the government sells, which could cause potential injuries, like a life raft, pilot helmet, or a flying aircraft will be demilled before it leaves the base. Demilling which stands for de-militarize, includes slashing rafts with a razor knife, crushing helmets, or in the case of an airplane chopping the wings off, or cutting the fuselage into three pieces. Some of the aircraft stored at the Bone Yard are turned into remotely controlled drone aircraft like what was done with the F-106 drone program.
There are over 4,000 planes in storage, most now from the Vietnam era. I only wish I'd been able to go in the 60's when there were still planes from World War II there.
Here are some collected story from visitors:
"Every pilot I have ever talked to wants to visit but never does. It's kind of like an elephant graveyard, mysterious, exciting, a place where all kids dreams go. I think that's why not many of the pilots I've talked to have ever really tried to visit. I saw a documentary on the aircraft graveyard. They showed a part where they cut up the B-52's, all my pilot buddies were silent, I think if each of them were alone, they would have been crying."
"It shows the incredible creativity as well as the incredible destruction man is capable of."
"The airplane graveyard is just so erie, you almost can't help but feel sadness to such powerful machines be stripped of their beauty."
The Pima Air & Space Museum located at 6000 East Valencia Road, is now offering tours of Davis-Monthan's AMARC Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center. The tours have proven popular, so reservations are strongly recommended to guarantee seating. Seven days notice is preferable when making a reservation.
Pentagon Plane Identified? By Leland Lehrman leland@33o.com 12-31-4
Correction/Retraction From Leland Lehrman 1-3-5
Esteemed colleagues,
Thanks to some excellent analysis and tough love from the best team in the world, (Greg Zeigler, Kee Dewdney, Dick Eastman, Nico Haupt and Russell Pickering among others) I have this update to the Black aircraft piece I recently submitted to a number of websites.
The main problem was that I did not account for the angle of entry which, when accounted for puts the plane into the shadow.
From there, basically everything else falls apart. However, the exercise is not without value because the response from the community has been wonderful and enlightening.
In particular, the following sites have emerged as containing most of the important information. Not every site has every detail right, but there is a great deal of analysis and effort in these sites that bears rigorous scrutiny by anyone wanting to know what hit the Pentagon.
Esteemed Colleagues - frame one aircraft at Pentagon
I took the animated gif image from the website: http://www.physics911.net/missingwings.htm which shows the five-frame government-released pentagon video zoomed in on the area where the plane went. Looking at it over and over and at 400% zoom, I have finally reached the tentative opinion that it may be a small black military aircraft shooting a missile. The image appears consistent with a black A3 SkyWarrior or similar aircraft as indicated by Karl Schwarz, both an aircraft specialist and a talented, resourceful investigator. http://www.karlschwarz.com To the right in html email is an illustrated version of frame one outlining the aircraft in red and the possible white missile trail in orange. Attached is the same file, larger, for those without html email.
In particular, the image is not consistent with a shiny airplane of any sort. The only reflection appears to come from the forward area, near where the cockpit windows or front edge of the wings might be.
Look at this image of an American 757. http://www.airliners.net/open.file/745215/L/ The plane is almost entirely silver, and the tail is close to white and has clear and large markings on it. Now look at the plane in the image attached [aircraftoutlined.jpg] or on the web. Everything is black, and the sun is shining directly on it, as evidenced by the angle of the shadow on the box-shaped thing in the foreground, so there is no way the darkness could be shadow..
In the image attached, aircraftoutlined.jpg, you will see the red outline of the likely airplane and the orange outline of the possible missile trail. If you look at the image directly following this one in the five frame animation http://physics911.net/e-pentagon_animation.gif, you will be able to compare and contrast the two frames in order to establish other parameters that require a relational view of both frames. It is useful to view the images at 200-400% zoom and frame by frame slowly. Programs like the freeware Irfanview http://irfanview.com/ can zoom the file adequately.
There is almost no question that there is in fact some sort of white exhaust trail consistent with a missile trail in this image [aircraftoutlined.jpg]. *
Any contention that a 757 hit the Pentagon must deal with what that white cloud-like apparition is and as well how come the tail of the plane in the photograph is black. *
Black ops comes to mind.
I would be interested in going over these two images on the phone (505.982.3609) with anyone interested in order to describe the many difficult-to-put-in-words nuances. If these images do not come through, check them out online:
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
