Road Diary: Dodging lightning in the desert

Apologizing for the weather is such a common impulse in the Southwest that I began to wonder if it is taught in schools. "But it's a dry heat" is a popular cliche. More surprising were the number of people who apologized for the late-August humidity. "It's not usually this humid," they all said, with little variation. "This is our monsoon season."

Note to Arizonans: It is not necessary to apologize to someone who recently arrived from Atlanta for the humidity. If it hadn't been brought up, "humid" is not a word that would have crossed my mind.

It was, indeed, monsoon season in southern Arizona. In the desert, the storms are visible miles away but are still surprisingly sudden and ferocious. Visits to AMARC are always subject to last-minute delays in late summer; the middle of a vast open field, next to a large metal object, is not where you want to be in a sudden lightning storm.

Fortunately, the weather held on the day we visited. On a bright, clear day, planes and pieces of planes seem to go on forever -- inside and outside AMARC's fences. Surrounding AMARC are the civilian contractors that harvest its scrap metal, and other nearby businesses have gone into a similar line of work, restoring and salvaging parts from civilian aircraft.

Civilian aircraft also can be found at AMARC itself -- older models like the Boeing 707, the same basic aircraft as the KC-135 tanker the Air Force uses for midair refueling. In various stages of salvage, the airliners still bear the plumage of their former owners, from familiar U.S. airlines to Air Ghana.

In some cases, parts of the fuselage have been stripped away, revealing the familiar, reassuring ugliness of airline upholstery (was that random smattering of color ever fashionable?). The seats and tray tables are in the upright and locked position.

AMARC is no museum, but there are a few interesting sights. One is the DR-21 surveillance drone, an orphaned companion to the SR-71 spy plane. The tests of the DR-21 met with mixed success, the flights were expensive, and as satellites became more effective, the program was scrapped. Now the remaining four drones are sealed against the elements, sitting in one corner of AMARC.

Another standout is the Titan II, the former ballistic missile that is now recycled as a satellite launch vehicle. Lying on its side, with the nose cone removed and the engines wrapped and sealed, a Titan II looks far less imposing than it does in the silo.

We probably saw more F-4s than any other type of plane. They are being reworked as unmanned, radio-controlled drones for missile and other weapons tests. It was among the F-4s that AMARC looked most like a conventional junkyard -- planes sat on the ground or on wooden stands, many without wings or tails.

I understand that there are people who make a hobby of tracking individual planes, who are interested in each tail number; to me, though, once you've seen a hundred F-4s, you've pretty well seen them all.

It's not easy to think of these aircraft as individual machines -- each of which flew countless missions, carried weapons and went through several pilots over the years -- when you see them lined up like a mall parking lot the week before Christmas. Every plane here, at some point, meant the life of the people in it, whether it was a lone pilot or hundreds of airline passengers. For someone with a tendency to anthropomorphize machines, it's vaguely depressing to see them baking in the sun, all but forgotten.

It is difficult not to look upon the B-52s as living things. When a breeze kicks up, the wind through the rough metal sounds like a faint moan, as if the planes were protesting their fate in a whisper. Our guides told us that the area is particularly eerie at night, when the temperature drops rapidly and the darkness is punctuated by the creaks and pops of shifting metal.