"I like to think of some of them of having real lives, because if you could get the airplane to tell you the whole story of all the adventures it was on, all the times it performed its mission, and maybe the various pilots that flew the airplane, you'd have a real book," Keith Connolly, a retired Air Force pilot, says of the roughly 5,000 airplanes spread across a wide-open field in Arizona. The Boneyard, aka the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, accumulates retired aircraft for maintenance and parts. Directed by Andrew Breese, this video from the U.S. Air Force's Airman Magazine pairs beautiful time-lapse video of the Boneyard with interviews with retired pilots. Read more about the Boneyard in the accompanying article, "Holding Pattern," and don't miss this Flickr gallery of still photos. 

For more videos from Airman Magazine, visit http://airman.dodlive.mil/.

Via Bob Houlihan.