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Airplane graveyard6/22/2023 ![]() ![]() Unpleasant surprises sometimes await the techs in the desert. They get their tools ready, as well as gloves, sunscreen and a wary eye. But when a call from the owner comes in to begin the recycling process on an aircraft that’s more valuable broken up than in the air, that’s when Jet Yard’s technicians start the two- to three-month process of breaking down a jet. It just depends on the type of aircraft and what the market is,” Zemanovic says.Īfter a jet is sealed up, not much maintenance is needed. “Most that are retired will never fly again. The process of refreshing a stored plane involves a great deal of cleaning, checking and tuning up of equipment by Jet Yard’s techs.īut that doesn’t happen for most airliners. ![]() “Some are kept in storage for a short time before they’re sold and they’re back in the air,” Zemanovic says. (It’s not considered good branding to let customers see your planes gathering dust in the desert.) If they expect the aircraft to be there a while, a crew mounts a crane to paint over the airline’s tail and fuselage logos. Once a plane gets parked at Pinal, Jet Yard technicians get busy sealing up engines, covering windows and putting plugs into sensitive equipment to protect them from whirling sand and dust. And more than 12,000 airliners will end up at these facilities over the next 20 years, according to the Aircraft Fleet Recycling Association. A former military base located next to Saguaro National Park just outside of Tucson, Ariz., Pinal has a 6,800-foot runway that lets even the largest of aircraft land there.Īviation analysts Ascend estimate that there are roughly 2,500 airliners at boneyards like Pinal today. Zemanovic isn’t only a tech - he’s also the founder and CEO of Jet Yard, an airplane storage, maintenance and recycling firm based at Pinal Airpark in rural Arizona. Once an aircraft arrives in the boneyard, a team led by technicians like Tim Zemanovic gets to work. In most cases, jets get flown to aircraft “boneyards” around the world, located mostly in deserts where the planes are safe from the damaging effects of humidity. But what happens to a 747 after it has delivered its last passenger? When your car has coughed up its last mile, it usually ends up in a salvage yard. Meet Our Experts Where do old airplanes go when they’re no longer needed? To a “boneyard” in the desert, where they get stored and then stripped for parts - or reborn to fly again. Gordon Benzie Director of AR & Market Intelligence.Lacy Cotton-Hodgson Sr Product Manager at ServiceMax.Plus, since the ground is hard and dry, they didn’t have to pave anything to be able to move the planes around. Tucson’s low humidity, small amounts of rain, high altitude and alkaline soil rust and corrode metal at a slower rate, making it the perfect place for The Boneyard. It’s located on the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and has been collecting airplane skeletons since 1946. ![]() Its official name is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, or the AMARG. What this adds up to is a desert field lined with more than 4,000 abandoned military planes, the largest airplane graveyard in the world. ![]() Okay, it’s not *technically* a graveyard… it’s a storage and maintenance facility for aircraft and missiles, and it’s the sole repository for out-of-service aircraft from all branches of the US government. Ever wondered what happens to decommissioned military planes?Įven if you haven’t ever considered that question, the answer might surprise you: retired planes go to a massive graveyard in the desert known as The Boneyard. ![]()
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