Since the Wright Brothers first managed to beat everyone else into the air with a powered, controllable heavier than air flying machine (details here for those interested), a lot of airplanes have come and gone. Planes which once flocked in the skies above and filled the ramps at airports one day are seemingly gone the next. Crashed, burned, shot down, broken up for scrap, or just left in the weeds, some are gone completely before anyone realizes.
But there are a few special places (aside from museums and 'gate guardians') where aircraft can linger for years; some in hopes of eventual return to flight, some as organ donors for others of their kinds still in service, and some just waiting for that final trip to the scrap heap.
Stephen Dowling at the BBC recently wrote up the world's aviation "boneyards". The one at Davis-Monthan is one of the biggest and best known, and Dowling explains why:
If you find yourself driving down South Kolb Road in the Arizona city of Tucson, you’ll find the houses give way to a much more unusual view; rows of military aircraft, still and silent, spread out under the baking desert sun. On and on, everything from enormous cargo lifters to lumbering bombers, Hercules freighters and the F-14 Tomcat fighters made famous in Top Gun.
This is Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, run by the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (309 AMARG). It’s home to some 4,400 aircraft, arranged over nearly 2,600 acres (10.5 sq km). Some look like they were parked only a few hours ago, others are swathed in protective coverings to keep out the sand and dust. Inside the facilities' hangars, other planes have been reduced to crates of spare parts, waiting to be sent out to other bases in the US or across the world to help other aircraft take to the air again. To those who work here, Davis-Monthan is known by a far less prosaic name, one more in keeping with the Wild West folklore from Arizona’s earlier days. They call it The Boneyard.
Davis-Monthan is not the only aircraft boneyard in the world, but it is by far the biggest. The climatic conditions in Arizona – dry heat, low humidity, little rain – mean aircraft take a lot longer to rust and degrade.
Dowling does a good job describing not only D-M but some other boneyards around the world. In days of fluctuating military budgets and uncertain economics in commercial aviation, boneyards reflect what's going on in the flying business. Thanks to Google and Bing, it's possible to get aerial views that show quite a bit. It's a vicarious way to 'see' planes you might not find anywhere else.
Here's a link via Bing Maps to Davis-Monthan. And here's a link via Google Maps. Navigating the views can be tricky, but rewarding - the level of detail is astounding in some cases when you zoom in. It's not real time imagery (yet) but it can provide plenty of fantasy material about what one could do with a hangar, some parts, and one of those airplanes that's just sitting there...