Arizona aircraft boneyard (Davis-Monthan AFB) mothballing practice

Brief reference, not a forensic case. Used to make the moisture-pathway point by counterexample (low-humidity desert preserves metals) and to contrast with Navy practice of storing assets in seawater.

We also store old aircraft — probably in Arizona, in the desert — because moisture is the next point. Moisture provides the electrical pathway for chemical charge transfer. Corrosion is a chemical process, and moisture is a good way to transfer. You've got to have Kirchhoff's law, you've got to have a circuit. If you're going to have cathodic protection of something, you've got to have a complete circuit. We take old aircraft and we store them in the Arizona desert, because someday we may need those parts. That's where all the old B-52s were. You've seen the picture of when we had the SALT treaty — they would take the wings off the B-52s, so the Soviets could see by taking satellite pictures from space that we were destroying all our bombers in mothballs in Arizona. That's why we store them there. Of course the Navy, being good corrosion engineers, they store everything they have right there in the water, right in chloride-containing water. But it is nearly 70 or 72 percent of the earth's surface.