FOR INFANTRY and armoured cavalry, target practice is relatively straightforward. Load up on training rounds and aim for paper bullseyes, plywood cutouts or life-size models of enemy vehicles. Air-defence forces have a trickier time. Despite the exception of the occasional Chinese spy balloon, the skies do not offer a wealth of objects to shoot at.
One solution comes from the armed forces’ own fighter jets. Since 2010 Boeing has converted retired F-16 fighter jets into unmanned QF-16s (the Q designates a drone). They are easily identified by their orange tails. The Air Force uses them as chase planes or shoots missiles by—but not at—them. After some 300 hours of being chased and shot at, they end their service lives as targets over the Gulf of Mexico, where they are shot down with live ordnance. The debris ends up as an artificial reef at the bottom of the sea.
The source of the converted F-16s is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, or AMARG, at the Davis-Monthan air-force base in Tucson, where the Department of Defence and some civilian agencies such as NASA and the Department of Agriculture store surplus aircraft. It is better known simply as “the Boneyard”. AMARG is a perpetual source of fascination on internet forums frequented by aviation nerds, who pore over satellite imagery of the 3,200-odd aircraft of 75 different types scattered over 2,600 acres of desert. AMARG describes itself as “America’s National Airpower Reservoir”.
The reservoir is topped up and drawn down as needed. In 2021, as America hastily withdrew from Afghanistan, many Russian-built Mi-17 helicopters purchased for the Afghan armed forces happened to be at maintenance sites abroad. With no question of sending them to the Taliban, they were transferred to AMARG and put into storage. After Russia invaded Ukraine the following year, Joe Biden included the helicopters in an $800m military-aid package to Ukraine. They still bear their desert camouflage, albeit with blue-and-yellow stripes painted on the sides.
In the imagination of the public, the Boneyard is where ex-service planes go to decay. In practice, AMARG is a temporary storage site, a source for spare parts and a “regeneration” facility, where stored planes are made fit to fly again. “Nothing that you see out here is junk,” says Robert Raine, AMARG’s spokesman. Even what is obviously junk—a bunch of decaying B-52 bombers with their wings and tails chopped off—is there for a reason. They are kept in that state so that Russian spy satellites can verify America’s compliance with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
Whole-aircraft transfers such as those to Ukraine (or other allied countries) are less common than the reclamation of parts from stored aircraft for use on serving fighters, bombers, transport carriers and others. The parts could be anything from engine components to entire horizontal stabilisers (those are fins at the back of a plane, jutting out sideways underneath the tailfin). Mechanics—whom AMARG calls “artisans”—go out into the desert, locate the part, extract it, and bring it to a warehouse where it is cleaned, checked, packaged and shipped. The reservoir can process up to 30 such requests every day. AMARG sent out thousands of parts during Operations Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.
Once an aircraft has been stripped of its usable parts, its owner—the Air Force, Forest Services and others—usually asks AMARG to get rid of it. The first step is to pull off anything classified and to “demilitarise” the plane. Hazardous bits such as hydraulic fluid, materials like asbestos, and explosives like those in the ejection seat system are all removed. So are composite materials. Contractors then take over, running what’s left through a shredder, twice. The ex-plane emerges on the other side in pieces about half a centimetre in length. “This stuff is high quality aluminium. It becomes, at a minimum, car parts,” says Mr Raine. Other metals, such as titanium, are also reused. “You get a lot of golf clubs out of a wing box on an F-14.”■
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