Old airplanes go to the deserts of Arizona and California to die, and the graveyards are getting more and more crowded as the economy languishes.
Aircraft storage yards report a big spike in the number of planes. Some of them have been mothballed by airlines struggling to manage the double whammy of volatile fuel prices and the tanking economy, and the odds are good many of them will never fly again. Call it a sign of the times for the beleaguered airline industry.
One place seeing a bump in business is Evergreen Maintenance Center at Pinal Air Park in southern Arizona. There are 185 aircraft there now, and company president Jack Keating expects another 27 by the end of the year. He says he hasn't seen numbers like since the months after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
"There's some amazing things happening with the reduction of people flying," Keating told the Arizona Daily Star.
If you have an airplane you need to stash, the desert is a great place to do it. There's not much humidity and almost no smog, so there's little risk of the fuselage corroding, and there's nothing but room out there in the Mojave.
Once parked, a lot of the planes get Canyon Ranch spa-like treatment. The crew at evergreen drains the fluids then covers the windows, engine inlets, tires and landing gear with Mylar. Planes are towed around the lot once a month to keep the tires in good shape. It's a similar drill at the military boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
The engines are filled with heavy oil to protect them, and all the openings are sprayed with a white latex-based coating called Spraylat to deflect some of the heat and keep the wind, dust and vermin at bay.
Airplane boneyards go through boom and bust cycles. They were swamped by retired military planes after World War II. By the end of the 1960s, they were being filled with prop planes as airlines took delivery of their first passenger jets. There was an influx after the big oil shock of 1974 and another in the early 1980s when deregulation changed the way airlines utilized their fleets.
The 9/11 attacks sent entire fleets to the desert, and boneyard aficionado John Weeks says things got so bad in the years following that sometimes airlines would fly planes directly from an assemblyline to a boneyard without having carried a single passenger.
Some of the planes currently baking in the desert will go back into service as the economy improves, but others have reached their final destination.
Keating says he expects that 40 percent of the planes at Evergreen will never fly again, especially older gas guzzlers like the DC-9, DC-10,
L1011 and early 747s.
We're probably all lucky that some of the old birds sitting in those graveyards aren't being pressed back into service. But for those of us who love aviation, there's something a little bit sad about row after row of aging aircraft sitting in the desert, all but forgotten.
Photo: Flickr/Divwerf
