Aren't these all from arms limitations treaties back in the Cold War days? The deal was everything had to be mothballed or broken and left out in vast dumps so the spy satellites could see them.

It is still a waste, though. Surely by now they'd be worth breaking up and reusing all the metals and stuff.

Sifter we missed ya!

Flippin' 'eck!! Are the majority of those B52s? Imagine how much money that scrap yard is worth.

My boyfriend has just informed me they keep them in the desert because they don't rot.

Imagine how many families that would take care of if they were scrapped.

Hmmn, I'm not 100% this is Sifter, email addy doesn't look right.

IIRC the strategic arms treaty included the visual destruction of a percentage of long range nuclear capable bombers. Hence the B52's getting chopped up. Though the vast majority of the aircraft stored there are either mothballed for future use (in times of war, or to be rigged as drones and shot out of the sky), also a great deal of hardware there is actually for sale!

PM if interested. (just kidding).

The Sifter3000 account has been banned as it's not Alex (the original Sifter3000).
I'm not having some joker potentially stir up trouble with CPC/BT

They're not B-52s - they're mostly C-141 Starlifters and C-5A Galaxys, plus some KC-135 tankers. They're pretty old and have been gradually phased out by newer types (C-17 Globemaster, C-5B/M)

Good idea and very quick action, Saspro. Nice work.

If this is the Davis Monthan Airforce base, then there are two different locations and two different classes of aircraft.

The location is part USAF base and part private scrapyard. There appears to be hundreds and hundreds of aircraft from the USAF, the USN and other US military outfits. The working ones are (as noted) stored here because the environment is pretty friendly for them

There is the famous B52 graveyard and the guillotine that chopped them up. It's one heck of a place to view with Google Earth.

And good riddance to the Sifter impersonator

Virtually zero humidity. But they have to spray them with this weird gel stuff to stop the sand getting in. Thousands of planes, in the desert, all wearing sun tan lotion. Most bizarre.


Not as many as you'd think. Warplanes are designed to be as light as possible, so they aren't actually big lumps of metal at all. Most of what they're made of are composite materials that are pretty much impossible to recycle, or at least not very economic. There are probably some precious minerals in the bits that could be easily pulled out like circuit boards but the actual frames were never designed to be recycled or indeed dismantled; I assume they thought the enemy would do that for them.

Jon

Yes, I remember seeing the guillotine thing on some Jeremy Clarkson programme ages ago - probably Extreme machines or something.

I remember seeing it on Mythbusters when they were testing the "chicken shot out of a cannon" theory. They basically chopped the front half of a plane off using a guillotine. I remember Adam wanting on in his backyard

Incidentally, what happened to Mythbusters? Haven't seen it around recently.