A worker applies a spray-on sealant to the wing of a C-130 at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base aircraft boneyard.

 Josh Galemore / Arizona Daily Star

As boneyards go, this place is pretty lively.

Before many Tucsonans have even started their morning commute, a pair of aircraft mechanics are already crouched over the open cockpit of an F-18 fighter jet, disarming the ejector seat and removing the explosives.

Nearby, a towing crew pulls a Navy P-3 anti-submarine aircraft over to the β€œflush farm” to be drained of its fuel. Then they hook up to a different F-18 and haul it to the β€œwash rack” for perhaps the last thorough cleaning it will ever get.

Meanwhile, about a mile away, a small army of specialty painters fans out across a dirt lot to spray protective coating on row after row of mothballed C-130 transport planes.

Welcome to a typical Thursday morning at the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, Tucson’s most famous 4-square-mile parking lot with roughly $34 billion worth of military might.

The people who work here generally refer to the place by its acronym, or β€œA-marg” as they call it. Most everyone else β€” here and around the globe β€” knows it as the airplane graveyard, or simply the boneyard.

But that nickname only tells part of the story.

Though the boneyard is the final destination for most of the warplanes that end up there, some do return to the sky.

In May, AMARG restored a B-52 bomber to active duty after more than a decade in storage. Now workers at the facility are preparing dozens of retired F-16 fighter jets to fly again, this time as full-sized, β€œdrone” aerial targets piloted by remote control.

They also help get surplus military machines ready for delivery to U.S. allies, like the six helicopters that were sent to Greece earlier this year and the five more that will soon be sold to Israel.

β€œAny day that you come here, there’s a really wide variety of things we could be working on,” says Air Force Col. Jennifer Barnard, now in her third year as group commander. β€œWhen somebody says, β€˜Oh, is this happening at A-marg?’ Yeah, probably.”

It takes longer to defuel the massive Lockheed C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft because they are powered by multiple engines.
The sum of its parts

Arguably the boneyard’s most important mission is to serve as a giant, open-air parts warehouse for the U.S. military and others.

During the past fiscal year alone, AMARG β€œreclaimed” 5,744 different parts from the aircraft in its collection, saving taxpayers an estimated $405.9 million in replacement costs.

And as the only facility of its kind in the nation, the boneyard is often the only place left to find the parts needed for certain types of older aircraft.

Barnard says simple, high-priority orders can be filled the same day, but larger, hard-to-reach parts can take weeks or months to harvest and deliver.

β€œWe’ve done special cuts on aircraft, where we’ll cut a piece of an airplane and send it to somebody who needs it,” she says.

One of the C-130s that services the science stations in Antarctica sports a tail section that once soaked up the sun in Tucson.

β€œThat’s kind of why we get looked at as an air power reservoir,” Barnard says. β€œOur guys take a lot of pride in preserving these aircraft and taking really good care of them. They know they might be needed again, whether it’s a whole airplane or just its parts.”

John Sparks, an aircraft worker at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base aircraft boneyard, suits up before washing pieces of an A-10 using β€œnaval soap” that is meant to prevent corrosion.
A visit to the β€œflush farm”

Roughly 95% of aircraft arrive at the boneyard under their own power. They land at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and taxi through a gate at the southeastern end of the runway to be prepped for slumber.

Their first stop is the β€œflush farm,” where defueling supervisor Dale Pace and his crew can service up to six aircraft a day, depending on the type.

Pace says the task takes longer for large airplanes with multiple engines like the massive C-5 Galaxy transport. β€œThat takes us forever and a day to defuel,” the former Air Force mechanic says.

It works a little like a blood transfusion. All of the aviation fuel is pumped out and replaced with a special oil, similar to the stuff used in sewing machines, that coats the tanks and fuel systems to protect them from corrosion. The only way to do that is by firing up the engines.

On this recent Thursday, the crew is working on the Navy P-3, which arrived at AMARG the week before and was towed to the flush farm earlier in the morning.

Two members of Pace’s team climb behind the controls of the retro-looking airplane and spin up all four props to burn off the last of the jet fuel and draw the oil into all the places that need protecting.

Pace stands outside the aircraft, watching the engines for the telltale sign that the exchange is complete. As soon as he sees puffs of white smoke, like at the Vatican, he motions to the men in the cockpit to cut the power.

To coat all the necessary engine parts in an F-15 or an F-18, the fighter jets have to be lashed to the ground and run with their afterburners on, creating a rumbling sound that echoes across Tucson.

β€œAnd if you do it in the winter, you get a nice long flame” from the exhaust ports, says storage induction supervisor Herman Castillo.

Any airplanes that are expected to fly again one day must be brought out of storage once every four years to be refueled and fired back up to make sure their engines and other systems are still in working order.

Then they are flushed again, sealed back up and returned to the boneyard, Castillo says.

Durand Silva, an aircraft maintainer with the Civil Service, scrubs down the nose of a Lockheed C-130 being prepared to be sent off from Davis-Monthan Air Force base aircraft boneyard to a new customer through the regeneration initiative on Oct. 17, 2019.
The dirty job of getting clean

The next stop is the wash rack, where men in protective rain gear give a Coast Guard C-130 transport plane a nose-to-tail scrubbing before it flies off to be outfitted to fight wildfires. The aircraft has already been painted with the U.S. Forest Service name and logo.

Nearby, other members of the six-man crew use high-pressure sprayers and industrial degreaser to clean A-10 wings and landing gear pods recently β€œbrought in from the desert.”

The parts will be refurbished in a shop at AMARG and used to extend the life of the Air Force’s fleet of ground-attack jets, a mainstay at Davis-Monthan and in the skies above Tucson.

Wash rack supervisor Mike Sherry says that on average his crew cleans about four airplanes and 50 refurbished parts each week.

The men bake all summer in their rubber suits, then spend the cold winter outside soaking wet.

β€œIt’s miserable work,” Sherry says. β€œIt’s one of the hardest jobs at AMARG.”

It’s also an important one. Cleaning the aircraft and their components makes them more resistant to decay, Sherry says.

β€œI’m kind of a jerk. I’ll go behind my guys with a white glove,” he says with a grin. β€œThese aircraft need to survive out in the desert for a long time.”

The hangar where a six-man crew uses sprayers and degreaser to clean A-10 wings and landing gear pods. The parts will be refurbished and used to extend the life of other aircraft.
Serving the armed services since 1946

The boneyard was established in 1946 to store World War II bombers and transports.

Tucson was chosen for its dry desert air β€” perfect for preventing corrosion β€” and hard caliche soil capable of supporting heavy airplanes without the need for thousands of acres of concrete.

It became the nation’s primary storage center for military aircraft in 1964, when about a thousand Navy planes were transferred to the site from a depot near Phoenix.

The facility’s inventory hit an all-time high of 6,080 aircraft in 1973, as the Vietnam War was winding down.

Today, AMARG is home to about 3,280 aircraft of 80 different varieties, from small helicopters to some of the world’s largest military cargo planes.

As Pace, the flush farm supervisor, puts it, β€œEverything for everyone ends up out here.”

Each branch of the military is represented, as are the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, FBI, Forest Service, NASA, the National Science Foundation and several allied governments.

Barnard considers all those agencies and armed forces her customers. They have the final say over how their airplanes are stored and used.

β€œWe don’t own anything here,” the commander explains. β€œWe’re like giant property managers. We take care of these things, but we don’t own any of it.”

Lots of veterans, not much saluting

The atmosphere at AMARG is businesslike but decidedly unstarched. Roughly 700 people work at the boneyard, and almost none of them are required to salute anybody.

Barnard is one of only three active duty Air Force personnel assigned to the operation. The rest are civilian Defense Department employees and government contractors.

Barnard is still the boss, but she has to work a little harder at it.

β€œI actually have a personal philosophy that if you lead civilians, if they choose to follow you, you’re that much more effective of a leader. Because they have a choice, right?” she says with a smile.

A lot of the employees have military backgrounds and many of them served as aircraft mechanics.

Before he ended up as AMARG’s wash rack supervisor, Sherry used to maintain fighter jets at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, among other places. He says a few of the F-16s he worked on when he was in the Air Force have since showed up at the boneyard, including one or two problem birds he wasn’t too happy to see again.

Some aircraft show up with personal notes written on them by the last people to fly them.

Sherry points to the F-18 that was just brought to his crew for a wash. There on the nose cone, a pilot with the call sign β€œDude Bro” has left his goodbye in black Sharpie: β€œThank you for your service ol’ girl.”

Sherry says AMARG occasionally invites pilots out to watch when one of their old airplanes is ready to be retired for good, once all the usable parts have been harvested and the thing is about to be cut up and crushed into little pieces.

β€œWe try to find the pilots who had the last flight on them. To watch them get choked up, it’s heart-wrenching,” he says.

Gary Chartier, a contract aircraft mechanic, disarms the ejection system on an F-18 fighter jet the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base aircraft boneyard on Oct. 17, 2019.
Disarmed for the trip to the β€œdesert”

Dean Clark and Gary Chartier play a crucial role at the boneyard. They’re the ones who make sure no one gets blown up or launched into the sky while working on one of the mothballed warplanes.

Today they are disarming the ejection system on an F-18. Standing at the top of some rolling metal stairs, Clark reads the steps off a checklist as Chartier leans down into the cockpit to disconnect and remove the explosive charges.

Clark says the process usually takes three to four hours, depending on the age of the aircraft.

Older F-18s are the worst, he says. β€œThere’s a bunch of springs and wires. It’s annoying.”

This is the last step in the β€œinduction” process before an airplane gets towed out to what boneyard workers call β€œthe desert,” though it isn’t a desert at all.

The storage area actually sits on roughly 2,600 acres of hard-packed dirt dotted with weeds, crabgrass and anthills. There, the airplanes are parked in neat rows and loosely grouped based on their status, which can range from ready to fly to soon to be scrapped.

Generally speaking, β€œanything that’s east of Kolb (Road), it will never fly again,” says Leo Bernier, a storage services work leader.

Various parts and boxes containing various pieces of aircraft lay in a field at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base Aircraft Boneyard on Oct. 17, 2019.
A boneyard with creature comforts

The far east end of the property is also where AMARG stores about 280,000 pieces of aircraft production tooling, just in case a defense contractor wants to fire up its factory again and start churning out new airplanes or parts.

For now, the stacks of tools and rows of wooden crates mostly provide shelter for pack rats, rattlesnakes and the occasional swarm of bees.

AMARG spokeswoman Terry Pittman says wildlife encounters are just part of the job.

Javelina regularly find their way onto the installation, including one that stole a boot that belonged to a member of the wash crew.

Not long ago, a mule deer got into the boneyard and lived there for about a month before state game wardens were called in to tranquilize the animal and move it off the base.

β€œJust last week, we found a ringtail inside a soda machine,” Pittman says. β€œI don’t know if it was trying to get warm or cold.”

A baby ringtail rescued from a mothballed bomber back in the 1950s went on to become one of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum’s earliest animal ambassadors.

Anything in the boneyard that still has wings β€” unless it’s an actual quail or owl β€” quickly gets lashed down with cables.

β€œAirplanes by nature like to fly, so when the wind blows you want them to stay on the ground,” Barnard says. β€œWe have a securing plan for every aircraft that describes how many of those tie-downs it needs. The most extensive one is the C-5, which has 72 tie-downs.”

Workers use a β€œsealing diagram” to cover an aircraft with easy-to-peel paint and a reflective thermal coating to help keep its inside cool while protecting the machine from the elements.
Saving taxpayers’ dollars

The final step in the storage process belongs to what everyone still calls the β€œSpraylat crew,” even though the boneyard doesn’t use that particular brand of spray-on latex coating anymore.

Using a β€œsealing diagram” supplied by the owner of the aircraft, the painting crew will cover every window, access panel, seam and opening with easy-to-peel paint and a reflective thermal coating to help keep the inside of the aircraft cool while protecting the machine from the elements.

The workers start the way any house painter might β€” by marking off parts of the aircraft with a special type of painter’s tape that pulls off easily without damaging the vehicle’s finish or leaving behind any sticky residue. Then they spray on two to three coats of black latex paint, followed by two coats of white vinyl similar to the flexible coating found on the flat roofs of many Tucson homes.

It’s β€œnot really rocket science,” but it is exacting, says Bernier, who leads one of the painting crews. Each coat is measured down to the millimeter to make sure it is thick enough to do the job but can easily be peeled off later if necessary.

They usually work in pairs, but some β€œbig birds” require a four-man team.

Coating a C-130 requires roughly 3,000 square feet of sealant that can take five to six days to apply. Your standard fighter jet usually takes four to five days. Certain helicopters have to be completely cocooned, which can eat up a full week.

The largest aircraft in the boneyard, the giant C-5, also requires seven days of taping and spraying, but it used to be a whole lot worse.

Bernier says the original sealing diagram for the massive transport required protective coating along the leading edge of every wing, including the one atop the tail, more than six stories above the ground. He says his crew would be lucky to finish a job like that in under two weeks.

The coating is designed to last five years, so Bernier and company have to reapply it to some of the aircraft that are stored for longer than that.

This is the most visible part of the operation, the part of AMARG the general public probably recognizes from looking at aerial photos or driving past the base.

To some people, all those idle but expensive airplanes represent an enormous waste β€” acres upon acres of needless military expenditures collecting dust in the desert sun.

But Bernier sees the boneyard like a bank account.

Every part of every aircraft they can save and pull back out later is one less part that needs to be bought or built somewhere else.

β€œWe’re saving billions of taxpayers’ dollars,” Bernier says as he stands in the shadow of a C-130 in the middle of its paint job. β€œThat’s what it comes down to.”

Subscribe to stay connected to Tucson. A subscription helps you access more of the local stories that keep you connected to the community.

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@tucson.com or 520-573 4283. On Twitter: @RefriedBrean