50 Years Of The Desert Boneyard

Photos of retired American military aircraft, emphasizing their nose art.

The United States military stores more than 4,000 aircraft in the Arizona desert at the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) facility adjacent to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Known as the “Boneyard,” this facility is much more than a place where aerospace vehicles come to die. Here some aircraft are maintained in both short- and long-term storage, while others serve as a “parts inventory on the wing” holding valuable spare parts in known locations ready to be harvested, overhauled, and returned to the fleet when needed. When an aircraft has yielded all the parts necessary to keep its brethren in the air, its carcass eventually meets the scrapper’s torch. AMARG’s storage rows are home to massive fleets of F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 fighters, aerial refuelling tankers, C-130 and C-5 transports, helicopters of varying sizes, and bombers from the frontline B-1 to B-52s that are much older than the pilots flying them around the globe today. Among the rows are special use aircraft including the AWACS, P-3 maritime patrol bombers, aeromedical evacuation aircraft, and reconnaissance planes that serve a variety of missions, along with celebrity aircraft such as MiG killers that dominated the skies in aerial combat. As well as bringing the reader up to date with recent activities at AMARG, including the intake of new aircraft types, regeneration and the return to the fleet of aircraft formerly in storage, this book presents new, never-before-seen images that provide a visual tour of the Boneyard.

The Consolidated B-32 Dominator was the companion Very Heavy Bomber to the famed Boeing B-29 Superfortress. Used extensively for a revolutionary crew training program in the United States during 1945 just nine reached the Pacific before VJ day. The Dominator made its mark on history in the skies over Tokyo. Just days after the official cease fire was agreed on it battled Japanese fighters over a two day period marking the last official aerial combat of World War II. With the completion of the war every B-32 was scrapped and it slipped from history. Echoes of the Dominator brings to life the stories of the B-32 Dominator as never told before through the eyes of the men who flew it into the pages of history. Follow the men through training and into combat where their lives were forever changed by events that occurred when the war was supposed to be over.

This bibliography lists published and printed unit histories for the United States Air Force and Its Antecedents, including Air Divisions, Wings, Groups, Squadrons, Aviation Engineers, and the Women's Army Corps.