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  • Mark Pilkington

The tech, science and awesome things blog BoingBoing has been running a series of “postcards” from British writer and photographer Mark Pilkington as he leads the Unknown Fields design studio through the American Southwest. The beautiful image above is from the group’s trip to the Boneyard, the airplane graveyard next to the Pima Air and Space Museum.

Head over to BoingBoing to see the rest of this “postcard” as well as the other posts in this series.

This article appears in Sep 6-12, 2012.

11 replies on “The Most Fantastic Picture Of An Airplane Graveyard You’ll See Today”

  2. The scale of the place is awesome when examined using an aerial or satellite image library such as those available via Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

    (I wonder why the author thought that “Pima” was some sort of acronym?)

  3. The scope of this place is even more awesome when viewed using an aerial or satellite image library such as those from Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

    (I wonder why the author of the BoingBoing article thinks “Pima” is some sort of acronym?)

  5. So, the ultra liberal Tucson Weekly has a fascination with military hardware after all? Just goes to show where their cultural marxist values really lie.

  6. Underlying all this American tail-chasing defense spending is the one jobs program that intoxicates hypocritical far righty to the point of snake-handling rapture. No wonder there is a boneyard…

  7. BlueGrassBoy: I’m not above admitting that, even if I was struck by it, it’s not going to be the best photo that everyone will look at that day. If you see great photos of local interests, feel free to let me know about them. I’d be glad to point people in their direction.

    Amalakite: Well, shoot. You’ve figured me out, comrade — er, “friend.”

  8. Red Star, you have a point. But, upon reviewing other posts in that series, they appear to be focused on architectural and design concerns, rather than human concerns, as with the photos you linked to, or what you suggested they be doing.

    On a related note, the only way to describe that series of photos by Tracey Shelton is “stunning,” on every conceivable level.

  9. David Mendez (09/09/2012 at 11:39 AM), your original post is not without value, or, if you wish, “merit,” whatever that is.

    If you wish to blandly and falsely draw a line between architectural/design/engineering joy and “human concerns,” Red Star suggests there’s a problem here. Consider the Nazi death camps, the Nazi architecture and engineering. And so on. It would be interesting to consider the human cost to USA of this boneyard. Can the nice photo make up for that deadend cost?

    The guy in Tracey Shelton’s #7 was wearing Nikes.

  10. Why do some readers feel the need to turn almost every article (outside of the food and restaurant subjects) into something negative (usually of a political nature) so they can start a snarky political/moral/philosophical debate over it?

    For a wide variety of reasons, planes (both military and commercial) are manufactured to serve specific functions, and eventually need to be ‘retired’ when either the function they were designed to do no longer exists, or they become old, obsolete, etc..

    The ‘Boneyard’ is merely the equivalent of a waiting room for aircraft until they can be taken apart and the parts recycled or destroyed, just like salvage yards for cars and trucks.

    The ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ reason for the existence of the planes had nothing to do with the article or the images.

    Photographs of the ‘Boneyard’ are simply that: photographs of places the photographer found architecturally ‘interesting’ – the VA Med Center is important for what goes on inside the buildings (which are not architectural elements that would be photographed in a photographic tour of the southwest) not about the aesthetics of the external design.

  11. Social, and of course, political and economic context and consequence of human activity matters, including architectural. That’s why, Joan Chamonix Bell.

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