COOOOOOOL!!!

Ok, so I'm a bit biased, but being the travelling companion of an engineer does bias you in certain ways and AMARC no matter how you slice it is COOOOOL! AMARC stands for Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Centre. The whole war-thing aside and looking at it purely from an engineering point of view, this place is amazing! Approximately 4200 aircraft at any given time, all of them have had their weapons, engines and classified info stripped. On one side of the road that runs into AMARC are the planes that can or will fly again, on the other are planes that will be stripped for parts or "destroyed" because of some arms treaty or another. You'll notice that all the planes have layers of white stuff on them - well the desert gets hot. They seal the holes, spray a black sealant on and then a white sealant. It dries to a plasticy-like material that can just be pulled off as necessary - say if you need to fly the plane again - just put the engine back in and off you go. All in all this is mostly a civilian operation - actually mostly a lockheed martin operation if I was listening closely enough, there are 2 flyboys (or girls) onhand to test the planes if necessary, but mostly they just check them out, repair them or put parts together for the people in the field as necessary. Total amount of hardware on site...something like 3 billion US dollars worth.