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CHAPTER 2

Flight or Fight

COAUTHORED WITH PRISCILLA BENNETT

The permanent war economy of the United States has produced the world’s most powerful and destructive airborne fleet. According to the CIA, the United States has over thirteen thousand military aircraft in operation today, while its nearest competitors, Russia and China, have about half as many combined. But planes do not remain combat-ready indefinitely. In this chapter, I follow military aircraft as they are transformed through reuse, preservation, and memorialization, each of which involves tensions over what can be done with them and what they mean.¹ In some cases, people attempt to rethink planes beyond their application in war, or to demilitarize them. In each case, the possible affordances of planes, as material objects, complicate the view that they are nothing but tools of violence or propaganda to justify permanent war-readiness.

Whatever the tactical benefit of having a permanent supply of destructive aircraft, the enormity of the American fleet creates no shortage of logistical problems. The United States needs more space to keep and store planes, spare parts, tools, and repair staff. No object remains the same over time without constant attention. This effectively means that aircraft are perpetually re-created as they are fixed, improved, updated, and cared for. As discussed in the previous chapter, this is a key part of how materials are designed, tested, and retrofitted by military manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, even after they are sold.

When planes outlive their usefulness, they usually go to the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tucson in Arizona. Davis-Monthan is one of the largest areas in the US Air Combat Command. Due to its size, the dry desert climate (which helps avoid corrosion), and depopulated surroundings, it became the base of operations for the Military Aircraft Storage and Disposition Center (MASDC). This became the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center (AMARC), popularly known as “the Boneyard.” According to Michael Thompson ([1979] 2017), it is precisely when things are intentionally forgotten and ignored—when they become set aside as what he calls “rubbish”—that they are capable of the most radical shifts in meaning and worth. On a tour of the Boneyard, a visitor is just as likely to spot a coyote as a person wandering amid the many, many planes. It is easy to imagine the Boneyard as a kind of dystopian wasteland, and many filmmakers have chosen it as a location for precisely this reason, including for the Transformers and Terminator franchises.

In theory, rubbish potential is amplified in situations where seemingly durable items, like planes, are initially forgotten, only to be resurrected in new forms. Central to my argument in this chapter is the idea, common in studies of materiality and familiar to anyone engaged in repair or reuse, that things like war planes are never just weapons, even for the armed services—they are also material objects. When Priscilla Bennett went to the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, a volunteer docent reprimanded her for touching the rivets on an airplane wing (even though visitors are explicitly invited to touch). He compared it to the skin of Bennett’s grandmother, arguing that one should not be too rough with something so aged and fragile.

Like a living thing, planes possess qualities that require care and attention but also offer affordances, or alternative and open-ended opportunities. An affordance can be understood to usher from materials themselves (Ingold 2000) or more from ethical attunement to their semiotic potential (Keane 2016). Regardless, the key aspect of an affordance is that interactions with things in the world are not decided in advance and can lead one in new and unexpected directions: “The idea of affordance usefully draws us away from treating material forms as wholly transparent” (Keane 2016, 30).² This sense of affordance fits well with the literature on repair and reuse. Every act of repair is simultaneously an act of discovery and a learning process. The role of the unknown endemic to repair leads to various tensions: between design and repurposing (Houston et al. 2017), between stability and breakdown more generally (Graham and Thrift 2007), or as part of distributed expertise associated with “enacting the object” through “regimes of maintenance” (Denis and Pontille 2017; Houston 2017). In this sense, an exploration of exceptional moments of repair exposes the underlying politics of remaking. Connecting these ideas, what Thompson considers rubbish arguably offers exceptional affordances for new uses, while also exposing political and moral tensions associated with remaking and enacting objects.

I combine these literatures to explore the re-creation of aircraft around the Boneyard, especially the tensions evoked by nonstandard uses of military craft. Airplane rubbish can be examined in at least two ways. One is exemplified by the Boneyard. As an active part of a permanent, global, and airborne military, the Boneyard is also a locally circumscribed place that releases materials over time into the hands of civilians in the surrounding area—by donating them to the collection of museums or scrapyards, for instance. This chapter begins by examining what becomes of rubbish planes, how they are assessed, remade, and displayed, and to what ends. I argue that reusing planes around the Boneyard tends to involve a tension between their technically and aesthetically valued capacity for flight and their ability to serve as signs of military history and national identity. Based on interviews with civilians working and tinkering around the Boneyard (some retired service members, some not), I find that repurposing these artifacts can involve struggles over their historical and ideological relevance.

The Pima Air and Space Museum, which has developed around the repair-scape of the Boneyard, exemplifies this tension between fight and flight. Museums are intriguing institutions because they are not monolithic, but lie at the intersection of a variety of interests, publics, and values.³ The different actors involved in museums may not all agree on what specific exhibits to display and how, what kinds of crowds should be sought after and appealed to, and which outside parties to partner with to accomplish these goals. And the clash and commingling of these different positions are evident in the semiotic labor of display. Presented with the display of any object, one can ask how it is meant to resemble other forms it is more or less similar to, how it is meant to point to its history of relations with other contexts and entities, how it is meant to represent more general values and shared understandings. As Terrence Deacon (2012) argues, furthermore, different ways of signifying often work together as we think, thereby forming a semiotic scaffold between the first thought and the next. In this way, deeper symbolic meanings can be propped up by the more direct associations our minds tend to make. Direct associations include materially perceptible qualities that underlie interpretation of a more conventional sort, including forms of patriotic reverence or war memorialization. When a restored plane points to historical relations or resembles an acknowledged prototype, these associations become part of the semiotic grounds of a struggle that is at once about what is present and what is absent, about the material and the immaterial.⁴ In the case of Pima, according to its director, there is a competing focus between displaying planes for military commemoration and displaying them as tokens of aeronautic history. In other words, it is not necessary that the restoration and exhibition of a flying machine glorify warfare and war preparation—other ways of interpreting planes are possible and always have been.

At the same time, this distinction between the Boneyard and its civilian surroundings threatens to reaffirm a divide between militarization and militarism, or between the material project of war (at bases and in battles, in the hands of pilots) and its cultural and ideological reckoning (at museums and in public storytelling about warriors and warfare, in the hands of civilians). In order to challenge this categorical separation between war’s conduct and its representation, I also consider how reusing and aesthetically decorating planes has been part of competing interpretations and uses of them since their earliest involvement in warfare. Here I draw inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual distinction between states and nomadic war machines, respectively, where the latter tend toward an anarchic aesthetics of singular decoration (1987, 395–403), meaning weapons are affordances that suggest open-ended uses that go beyond their designated state function (Adkins 2015, 203–10). The war machine and the state have become mutually dependent over the course of history, yet the “exteriority” of the former (its “capture” by the latter) is evident in tensions around the use and reuse of planes. The “minor art” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 401) of weapon decoration that I highlight is the frequently observed practice of nose art, where squadrons and pilots decorate their planes with iconography irreducible to mass-produced warfare and the interests of the state, which has inspired other artists affiliated with the Pima.

VARIETIES OF REUSE

What does it mean for something to be repaired or restored? This question helps to address the distinction between what goes on in the Boneyard and what goes on at Pima and related enterprises surrounding the base. Minimally, repair means that there is something broken that is being returned to a previous state of usefulness or wholeness. That previous state, which the damaged thing differs from, can be thought of as a prototype, an idea of what the thing was meant to be, or once was and could be again. A brand-new plane is not broken and in need of repair, but neither is one that has been broken down into metal scrap—the former is too close to the prototype to seem broken and the other is too far gone to be acknowledged as reparable. In its most basic sense, “Repair restores degrees of past capacity for present and future use,” in Lara Houston’s words (2017, 51). A broken thing is fixed to the extent that it more closely resembles this ideal type in the mind of the repairer, in the diagrams and instructions they refer to, according to aesthetic or functional standards they apply and so on. In practice, there can be extreme differences in degrees of repair in relation to the prototype. For example, with the new F-35, all of the components are so expensive that if a maintainer drops a tool on the wing and dings it, it has to be reported as a Class C mishap. By contrast, on an F-5 or F-18, if some component gets bent and can be pounded out it is not even reportable.

Rather than a place where disused machines are permanently dumped, the Boneyard is the open-air garage of the US military, where machines from the Air Force and all other branches are set aside, tinkered with, stripped for parts, and occasionally scrapped. These decisions ultimately depend on how the material qualities of planes are assessed and creatively manipulated. Paraphrasing Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, the repair and maintenance that goes on in the Boneyard is not incidental, rather it is part of what we might call the “engine room” (2007, 19) of permanent war-readiness. With low humidity, little rainfall, and high altitude, the site is ideal for preventing rust and corrosion. Of course, in the Arizona sun, paint peals and interiors steadily deteriorate, but this still has the desired effect of limiting the range of “different rhythms and durations of breakdown and repair action” (Houston 2017, 55). Consequently, more than four thousand aircraft are stored in these conditions and cared for, making the Boneyard the largest aircraft storage facility in the world, which is only appropriate for the largest airborne military in world history. Visitors to the Boneyard can take bus tours around the base, after showing an ID and getting past the gate attendant. And as one learns on the bus tour, they have the necessary tools for every aircraft present, in case they are put back into production. This is ultimately a cost-saving measure, allowing them to supply repaired and retooled planes on behalf of other bases and global military operations. The Boneyard is thus a repair-scape, meaning that this site and the people who work there are engaged in an ongoing process of differentiating objects, or determining the fates of their various material components in an open-ended fashion. This means saving some things, extending their usability for the time being, as well as routinely dismissing and disposing of other things.⁵

When done intensively, differentiation at a repair facility can beget all new forms of differentiation. Put differently, sorting and re-sorting objects can allow new qualities and new concerns to come to the fore. Shortly after World War II concluded, as a permanent war economy was being established, one notable entrepreneur in Tucson began acquiring surplus planes from the General Services Administration and melting them down. At the time, smelters were benefiting from the high price of aluminum. But sometime in the early 1950s, that operation also began restoring and collecting planes for display and sale. That business eventually became Aircraft Restoration and Marketing (ARM). ARM still exists today beside the Boneyard, with decades of accumulated knowledge related to repairing and rebuilding various aircraft. A number of other operations grew around the Boneyard, involved in experimental and virtual reuses of the landscape, whether to store objects or simulate interactions. Heading toward Phoenix, as you approach the county line, there is another site that stores commercial airplanes and airliner components. Out there in the desert Federal Law Enforcement agents train with tribal police, practicing maneuvers with cars. To the north is where scientists set up the Biosphere II initiative; after its conclusion, some recall an art display took its place: Native American “tribal masks” made from the distinct casings and flanges of nuclear weapons.

While many disused planes were ultimately scrapped for raw material, the military also practiced some preservation. Near the Boneyard, on the west side of the airport, there are still two wooden hangars left from World War II, which also used to serve as a bomb shelter during the Cold War. That the Air Force also began to preserve planes nearby is not surprising since preservation and restoration are arguably just more exaggerated forms of repair, involving further acts of differentiation. If all repair refers to some aspirational state, restoration suggests more careful standards regarding how this is to be accomplished. According to Elizabeth Spelman, “In its service to the past and the preexistent we find reasons to distinguish repairing something from creating it or replacing it, and in the conservative commitment of repair to continuity we note its difference from destruction” (2003, 126). With restoration, there is some sense that continuity itself is valuable, almost as an end in itself, an aesthetic quality quite apart from the ideal prototype associated with repair. Saying “this is a restored mansion” says as much about the virtues of restoration, of respect for aesthetic standards of design and construction for instance, as it does about the building itself. Unlike a repaired thing, however, when something is described as “restored,” this does not necessarily mean it can be used as it once was.

Some of the Pima museums planes are reclaimed by others and fly again. This is because museum objects are not deprived of use value or authenticity, but somehow saved and redeemed from a rubbish state.⁶ When staff at the Pima museum “restore” a plane for display, this does not necessarily mean that it is capable of flight, however, only that it looks like it did when it could fly. This is what ultimately divides the Boneyard from neighboring preservation and restoration operations. According to a brief, unpublished history written by James, director of collections and aircraft restoration at Pima:

The concept for the Pima Air & Space Museum began in 1966 during the celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the creation of the United States Air Force. Earlier the commanders of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and. . .MASDC. . .recognized that the historic World War II and 1950s era aircraft stored on the base were rapidly disappearing into smelters and that the flames were consuming not just metal, but the aviation heritage of the country. On their own initiative base officials began to set aside examples of the many types of aircraft stored in MASDC’s yards. These planes were placed along the base’s fence line so that the public could see them through the fence.

Unlike formal restoration, as done by (some) museums, repair and maintenance are common and critical elements of our material environments.⁷ The choice between repairing and restoring is not absolute, moreover, but is a matter of practical decision-making as actors engage with materials at hand, with different categories of utility at issue, and with different sets of skills and resources at their disposal. There are, in fact, operations in between restoration and repair, more similar to ARM—salvaging, scraping, and making things capable of flight—and others more similar to the Pima—preserving, restoring, and displaying objects.

The Cold War introduced world-picturing and world-destroying planes and satellites circling overhead, which were a source of both dread and fascination.⁸ By the 1960s, people would reportedly line up along the Air Force fence to see what had been saved. In other words, this act of preservation became a public display of the sheer variety of aircraft that had been employed by the growing American empire. Inspired in part by the public reaction, the base commander of the Boneyard worked with local veterans to create the nongovernmental Pima Air Museum (named after the county whose land they ultimately rent). They also began to acquire additional aircraft from abroad, including the last Consolidated B-24 Liberator in the world, donated by the Republic of India in 1969. The museum opened officially in 1976, and was initially hard to distinguish from the surrounding Boneyard, to which it was also indebted for its collection. As James describes it,

In the beginning the museum was little more than a fenced in field with airplanes parked on it and a small, white, trailer to serve as ticket booth and administrative office. By early the next year further small improvements to the museum’s infrastructure were put in place. The museum acquired several surplus storage buildings and erected a small, open-sided shelter for aircraft undergoing restoration in 1978. The dedicated staff and volunteers made the best of the primitive conditions and slowly the museum’s aircraft began to be reassembled, repaired, and repainted. In the early years the museum could be easily mistaken for a part of MASDC, or one of the numerous scrap yards in the area.

By the 1980s, the museum grew to include several hangars, a gift shop, and more professional museum displays. In 1982, the Tucson museum community approached the Air Force about preserving missile silos that were being retired along with the Titan II ICBM system. According to James, these silos too were part of “aviation history.” Even so, as a relic of the Cold War, it required international cooperation to verify that this was, in fact, no longer a useful and repaired artifact, but a useless and restored one,⁹ complicating varieties of reuse as they apply to military waste:

After much negotiation both within the U.S. government and with the Soviet Union it was agreed that one silo would be preserved for use as a museum. . .and after Soviet satellites were given time to verify that both the silo and the missile that would go in it had been rendered harmless, work began to set up a visitor center at the formerly highly guarded site.

The Titan Missile Museum eventually opened in 1986, “offering a rare look, both above and below ground, at the top-secret world of a nuclear missile silo.” James credits the addition of the silo with the beginning of a new direction for Pima, because “the original museum and foundation names no longer represented the true scope of the institution.” Pima stopped being primarily a military aircraft museum in the 1990s, when it was officially rebranded with a general aeronautics focus, “from balloons to outer space,” as James puts it. In 1992 the museum’s name officially changed to the Pima Air & Space Museum and the foundation became the Arizona Aerospace Foundation. In 1999, Pima opened a new space gallery, to further this larger aerospace focus (although James bemoaned the fact that it has not been sufficiently updated since that time).

If Pima began due to the proximity of the base, today only half of its collections come from the military. And it is primarily military museums they now work with to get these planes, located in Dayton or Quantico, not the Boneyard directly. The other half are not lent but purchased from private sellers and businesses who have no more use for a plane but do not want to see it scrapped. Beyond the museum’s origins, as a by-product of the Boneyard, the reason for this has to do with the greater availability and variety of military aircraft when compared with commercial planes or spacecraft. Like other local businesses and organizations, Pima is indebted to the permanent war economy’s abundant expenditure of objects, in this case conveniently concentrated in one location.¹⁰ Yet, what it does with airplanes is quite variable. Today, the museum is no longer in the hands of military officers or veterans, although it may engage with either depending on the exhibit in question.

A contrasting example is the 390th Memorial Museum, which is a separate entity from Pima, but is located on the same property. The director, Wally, is a retired Air Force pilot, and sees the primary focus of the museum as the memorialization of the 390th Bomb Group and the equipment and people who supported their efforts during World War II and Korea. The displays in this museum did discuss missions, specifically with B-17 and photographs of bomber crews. According to Bennett’s field notes:

A docent in the Memorial Museum had only been working there for six weeks. He explained that his uncle was a pilot in WWII who was killed in action and his dad was also in the military, a tank commander who was wounded in Korea, so he’s always “been in it.”

One of the volunteer docents at this museum comes from an “Air Force family.” Like many children in military families, Chuck grew up all over—primarily in Dayton, Jakarta, and Colorado Springs—but he eventually ended up in Tucson in 1978. He used to be able to see the tails of C-141 Starlifters at the Boneyard in the distance when he was lifeguarding as an adolescent. He thought they looked like whale fins. Those planes were eventually all recycled, but Pima got one. He remembers that, after his father retired, he worked for Western International Aviation, which acquires and refurbishes military planes from the Boneyard to resell. “I remember one time, they repaired a plane, got it flying, took it to France for someone there. . .and then another specific time they got a C-54, which is a four-engine cargo plane, running again and they took that up to Alaska for the fishing industry, for the canning industry so they could run stuff back and forth.” Like his father, when Chuck was finished with his military service, he also became involved in the restoration of military aircraft, along with the commemoration of service members.

As I will discuss below, at Pima these twin pursuits are in tension with one another. In Chuck’s case, he has worked both as a docent at the museum and as a model builder. In 2010, he cofounded the Sonoran Desert Model Builders (SDMB) club, a chapter of the International Plastic Modeling Society (IPMS) and the second one in the Tucson area. Some of the other modelers have military backgrounds; some are artists, carpenters, or work in electronics. They build all kinds of things—scenes from movies like Jaws, boats, commercial aircraft—but they do a lot of work at and around Pima and the 390th Memorial Museum, as well as with contemporary and retired military pilots. Along with the IPMS, the mode builders donated boxes of models and supplies to Iraq for model-building clubs in the armed services to use during their downtime. And one of those service members eventually joined the SDMB.

In 2014 the SDMB completed a project on World War II spotter planes that drew the attention of the board members of the memorial museum. In 2015, they began a project completing a model of the airfield in England used by the 390th. Fourteen by eight feet, the Station 153 Parham Field Diorama shows not only planes flying but the infrastructure that kept them flying. In this way, the model of the airfield reflects the repair-scape that surrounds and supplies the museum. This includes, in Chuck’s words, “individual squadrons, where they stayed. . .maintenance squadrons. . .where the women stayed. It represents the whole thing, so it’s not just about flying planes, it’s about keeping planes flying, all the supplies involved, all the people involved.” The finished model, we were told, would include a baseball game, dogs, people on bicycles, and letters reflecting on life on and around the airfield at the time.

Wally, Chuck, and the other volunteers see the diorama as a way of situating military machines within a place and a time, as well as a specific war. Wally explicitly said that this conflicted with the emphasis of Pima. As someone actively seeking out militarized human connections, Chuck has been collecting models of A-10 Thunderbolt II’s in his spare time, thinking that they could be used in a future project painting them, perhaps with young people. Such an event might draw Martha McSally, Republican US senator from Arizona, who flew the A-10 when she was an Air Force colonel, or the female commander of the local base, both of whom came to Pima when they launched their latest exhibit on women in flight. Wally also trained people on the A-10 during his service, so Chuck realizes there is a lot of potential for this old plane to inspire interest and excitement among commemorators, like himself.

Flight or Fight

Attempts to demilitarize the museum and foundation are not done in name only, but involve making available different ways of interpreting planes on display. Put differently, it means taking a weapon out of circulation, restoring it, and displaying it in such a way that visitors can come to appreciate alternative ideas about military objects. According to James, the way that artifacts are displayed at Pima is fairly uniform, whether or not they were used in the military, in space, or for commercial purposes. This is despite routine feedback from visitors that indicate something else is expected or desired. As he put it, “In general, the public expects the military stuff to be displayed in a more commemorative tone than the nonmilitary aircraft on display. They expect us to be a little more worshipful of people who were using these things in the war.”

James was typically this open and direct in conversation. Like many of the people interviewed for this book, James characterized himself as both insider and outsider. Many people came to the area as military personnel or as children of them. Others settled in the Southwest after growing up elsewhere in the country, but became drawn to the area around the Boneyard in one way or another. James received a master of arts degree in public history from New Mexico State University, and working at the museum was his first job out of college. He describes himself as always having been enthusiastic about aviation and aeronautics, though not wealthy enough to fly. Besides, he said, taking apart planes and finding out that commercial airliners are held together by four to six two-inch bolts, and nothing more, can put one off of flying entirely. When asked, James was quick to voice criticism of military spending, in line with the focus of chapter 1:

Obviously we need to have a military. I personally think our military wastes an awful lot of money on things that they don’t necessarily need to be spending money on. Everything wears out and gets to that point in its life, so it wasn’t necessarily a waste of money to buy those things at the time, although it kind of seems like it when you see four thousand of them just sitting in the desert. It’s more a matter of how they decide to spend money, [and] the complete dysfunction in the way the Pentagon budget is set and spent is really disheartening.

James has no military background, though around half of his volunteers and a significant number of visitors do. If there are many who expect that the museum’s staff will be dedicated to commemorating the military, loan agreements with the government state that any borrowed planes should be preserved, as James put it, “in a manner that does not produce a detriment to the image of the military.” But this stipulation allows for a wide interpretation. And this is evident in the way they restore planes and arrange their exhibits. According to James, “We’ve tried to move away from [military commemoration], but it’s a fact of how this is done. The cultural attitude of ‘the greatest generation’. . .is very ingrained, and with the events of the last fifteen years, the attitude toward veterans, anyway, has become much more respectful, perhaps overly respectful in some cases.” In effect, there is a tension within the museum between two competing approaches: one, more about war and those who fight wars, and the other a more technical history of flight itself. James expanded on this at some length:

Probably our greatest competing focus is between technological history presentation and military commemoration. . . We try to stay to the technological history side, rather than the commemoration side. There are other organizations that do commemoration and do it better than we could, so that’s not our primary focus. But a lot of people think, “Well, because you have military stuff you must be a veterans’ worship organization.” And we recognize the veterans, we respect what they’ve done, but. . .our primary focus is the technological development of aviation from balloons to outer space.

The expectation of commemoration is not just about patriotic ideas of respect for service members. Arguably, any act of reuse means reckoning not only with the pieces and materials an object is made of but also the lives they shaped and were shaped by, and the stories people tell about them, big and small. Like all reusers, the staff at ARM, Pima, and other surrounding enterprises can choose whether or not to attend to what James refers to as “the human connection” in practice, and to what extent. Because the objects they are reusing and remaking are associated with the military, their decisions and designs can have profound implications.

Let us say that you come across a military aircraft. You might reasonably wonder what branch of the military made use of it, which specific squadrons and individuals flew it, what battles it was used in, if any, and whether they were lost or won, whether anyone was killed or saved through its use, and so on. If you have insider knowledge, you might know to look at the fin flash or the squadron tail art to retrieve some of this information.¹¹ All of these characteristics are part of its history of use and may be detected by searching for features that resemble, indicate, and/or symbolize these historical connections in particular ways. The surface of a plane might reveal traces of past skirmishes or theaters of operation. This was mentioned in an interview with Carlo McCormick, an art critic who helped curate the Boneyard Project (about which more will be said below). When you are reusing old planes and come across bullet holes, you are particularly struck by what he called the “historical resonance” of the object. This is another way of saying that what is absent stands out as much as what is present before you. In fact, what is absent stands out precisely because of what is before you: symbols denoting a military vehicle and bullet holes indicating that a battle once took place. For Carlo, the presence of these signs only amplifies what is not there, the “resonance” of a history that happened and is now over, including the actual sweating bodies and fearful voices of the plane’s former crew.¹² Such present absences can be ignored, in theory, if instead you want a plane to fly again, let alone drop bombs or fire bullets. In this case, you would need to know something about aeronautics, something about its design and makeup, and something about what it has been through. To begin, you would explore the object as best you could for signs that it can still perform as desired. You would also want to store them in such a way that they could be easily found for repair and reuse.

At the Boneyard, like any scrapyard, items are differentiated according to type, with fighters and bombers grouped together. Insofar as these types can be readily interpreted as resembling one another, their resemblance affords ease of storage and access for the repair crew. There are other divisions of the space of the Boneyard that facilitate its actions as a repair-scape. One section, known as “celebrity row,” is for those planes that could potentially return to service. In a different section they store those planes that are being stripped for parts or dismantled, which will never return to service. Even if Boneyard mechanics are unable to make a plane fly again or are uninterested in doing so, it still must be kept in a state such that its parts can be harvested as needed. Everything that comes in gets washed on what is known as “the wash rack,” which every base has. Even those items in storage that may be disposed of are routinely washed, sometimes three or four times a year, at the wash rack, though if items come in large enough numbers, this can prove difficult to manage, as happened with a group of C-130 Hercules, which were delivered recently and went unwashed. Planes at the Boneyard are further draped with plastic sheeting over the windows, nose, engine, and/or propellers, to protect the plane and its valuable components from the elements. The only nonmilitary plane at the Boneyard in the summer of 2015 was a commercial Boeing 707 that was acquired in order to strip its engines and put them into a KC-135. In general, there are about twice as many engines as aircraft on site, since the engines wear down faster than the planes themselves. That way, an engine is sitting waiting while another is in use, which helps maintain the engines over time.¹³

Unlike repairers, restorers will rely on some shared, yet arbitrary, understanding of what counts as “continuity” with a past, idealized state. This decision is arbitrary because making an object look like it did five minutes or five weeks ago might accurately depict a past state, and yet not count as “restoration.” Evidence of repair is seeing something work as it once did; evidence of restoration would be seeing something that seems like it once did. If this is about iconicity—about relations of resemblance between an ideal state and a current state—this resemblance is mediated by a specific, shared idea of what a restored plane is supposed to look like. That depends on conventions maintained by airplane museums and held by visitors. The important point is that if you only want a plane to seem like it did when it flew, you interpret its qualities differently and end up with a potentially very different object—the simulation of a plane rather than an actual flying machine. Items at the Pima are cleaned up, painted, and, when possible, labeled with the markings they had when they were still in use.