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
