Where Planes Go to Die: A One Way Trip to the Mojave Boneyard (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Where Planes Go to Die: A One Way Trip to the Mojave Boneyard (2015)

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155 pointsuptown67 comments

For those interested in freely visiting somewhere like this, there are a few planes (including a 747) rotting on a plot of land in Bangkok. It's called the "Airplane Graveyard"[1,2].

When I went, a Mother+Son seemed to have the place fenced off, and asked for $6 (200 baht) to let me in. I happily paid and had a great time walking around, taking pictures, and climbing through the airplanes. It was fun climbing up the back of a 747, going up the stairs, hanging out in the cockpits, out doors, on wings, etc.

When I was there, there were no other tourists there (as I assume is usually the case). You have to be careful, as there are scraps and sharp things everywhere (though everything small seems to have been taken). One of the airplanes seemed to have someone (homeless?) sleeping in it, so I left it alone.

On the way out, the ~6 year old boy living there with his Mom asked me for another $6 before he unlocked the gate, but I told him I already paid. I argued for maybe 30 seconds and by chance another tourist showed up and the kid opened the gate for that guy and I left. Not sure what would have happened if the kid kept asking for money.

[1] http://triphackr.com/visiting-the-airplane-graveyard-in-bang...

[2] https://www.wheresidewalksend.com/bangkok-airplane-graveyard...

I regularly drive past a very small air salvage facility at Kemble airfield [1]. The road runs right past the airfield and multiple large jets are lined up in various states of dismemberment. Its very distracting and fascinating when you're driving across fairly barren English countryside, pop out of the trees and there in front of you are a dozen huge aircraft sitting on the tarmac.

I don't think you can easily go on site here, but easy to park up in the layby and watch from afar.

[1] http://airsalvage.co.uk/

>Not sure what would have happened if the kid kept asking for money.

Depending on the situation bluffing may work.

Just name drop somebody "important".

Also learned this from... John McAfee:

Do not get out of the car at checkpoints/shakedowns.

Great photo series. It's worth noting that not all of the planes are there permanently. Many are there in long-term storage and would be flyable with some maintenance.

Also I believe there's quite a few military b-XX there kept for spare parts.

The Air Force keeps theirs in Arizona at Davis-Monthan. And it looks the same, only bigger.

Yes, and if you're ever in Tucson, the Pima Air & Space Museum offers a bus tour (weekdays only I think) of the "bone yard" at Davis-Monthan. There's also the Pima Airpark a bit outside of town (see https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/19/business/747-airlines-fin... ).

I was going to add this as well. I have visited the Mojave airfield and "space port" a number of times, both when Rotary Rocket and Scaled Composites were active there and later as part of a group that was looking into wind turbine efficiency (there are big turbines up on the ridge to Tehachapi) A bunch of planes there have come off lease and are being held pending new leasing arrangements, those are basically ready to fly. Some have used up their cycle count (landings/takeoffs/pressurization/depressurization cycles) and act as spare parts for similar models still flying. One clue is the ones that have had their winglets removed are generally 'donor dollies' where the owner has started parting them out to recover what remaining value they have.

I would also love to crawl around the military depot in Arizona but so far have come up short on a good enough reason :-).

Given at least some of these aircraft have reached their usable lifecycle and presumably those stressed parts can't go back into similar aircraft at that point, why aren't the materials being recycled more?

Is it too costly to recycle these alloys? One might think that if aluminum drink cans are worthwhile recycling, more massive aircraft parts would also be profitable to recycle.

That is a good question, and it was the subject of a paper in 2007 (http://www.phinix.net/services/Recycling/Recycling_Aluminum_...) which basically says that aircraft alloys have a lot of impurities to improve their toughness which makes it harder to recycle them into something useful.

Thanks, that's interesting. Although it seems to presume that the recycled aluminum alloys would go back into aircraft and thus would need further [relatively costly] processing/refining to remove impurities and meet modern specs.

However, unless expensive to process at all (recycle) they could be recycled for other uses --like park bench frames, ladders, food service furniture, new truck beds, camper tops, etc. I can see where cheap iron may be more economic than even recycled aluminum though.

It is a solid idea. One of the things I have done a little research on is the question of planned economic communities. One possible engine in that type of community would be recycling.

It would be amazing if you could go there like pick-a-part for car parts and pick your own aircraft parts.

Some of those propellers and other parts would make amazing decor. The huge amounts of sheet metal could be put to good use too, I'm sure.

My other half won't let me make a coffee table out of a jet turbine.

These days that would be more of a dinner table :-). But clearly someone is thinking about it : https://aeroartshop.com/catalog/furniture/item/2-titanium-hi...

Aircraft junkyards are a thing - google "air salvage" and you'll find quite a few. Listed parts prices for usable parts are often high but they're usually friendly folks and could probably help you out with scraps. The Lowry air museum in Denver has a small sport aircraft built entirely of junkyard parts and flown by a private pilot for years in it, and I wish I could recall the name of it.

Given that I know the aviation industry is highly regulated, I wonder how certifications and such work out for salvaged parts.

Home build experimental aircraft are a lot less regulated than mass produced aircraft. You can build a microlight in your garage if you want.

http://nortonsalesinc.com/

I know rockets have been built out of these salvaged parts. A lot of money has gone into developing some of them.

Wonder what this guy could do with access to salvage parts like that..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-41813389

This is pretty much how the "boneyard" in Tucson, Arizona operates.

My brother as a kid found this on Google Earth or maybe even terraserver (which was an early host of satellite imagery of earth, I think from Microsoft) and obsessed over it forever.

The Army has a boneyard in Northern California near the Nevada state line.

https://goo.gl/maps/JnJBvefnT5G2

There's lots of M1 Abrams in storage there, as well as munitions in bunkers that were built for WW-II (to be clear - the munitions are pretty modern - the bunkers are the vintage part of that. Old/obsolete/unsafe munitions are disposed of.)

Apologies for the extreme nerd pedantry, but...

When he gets into the TG 747, he emerges in First, and then later makes his way to Business, rather than Business then First as he describes. Also the seats he's describing as leather-covered are fabric upholstered. I was on one of these a few days ago, as TG are still flying them, and with the hard product shown.

The featured C-133 propeller driven planes were death-traps when they were new, the chance of any of the ones in museums needing spare parts from the boneyard to make them air-worthy so we can see-off those pesky Russians is just not a good enough reason to hold on to these old air-frames. Yet they have kept them rather than put them through the recycling. Why hold onto these things for fifty years, do they have a procrastination problem?

Compared to the air force boneyard in Arizona - Davis Monthan AFB - this boneyard is miniscule so maybe they are doing a really good job of recycling all those 747s nobody needs and have their own reasons for keeping the junk. Fascinating the place may be, it could be tidier.

Does anyone know how to access this, or if tours or gates are open to the public?

The last line of the post states:

"The Mojave Boneyard is available for film shoots – send me an email if interested. Unfortunately, no tours are offered at this time, and the facility is strictly off-limits."

Thank you! Fascinating stuff, a shame there's no access but it makes sense for safety reasons.

They do have access every third Saturday of the month, part of the museum tours or smth.

American 9643, Tampa Tower, line up and wait Runway 01L

A long time ago when I was a student PP, the standard terminology would have been "American 9643, Tampa Tower. Taxi to position Runway 01L and hold. Acknowledge hold" at any airport I ever flew out of.

Did this change in the 25 years or so since I last sat in the left seat or is it just the reporter's interpretation? Then again, over a couple decades, jargon can be expected to evolve...

Just need some feral children chanting about Capn’ Walker.

Great photos, I’m so glad that they weren’t posted on Instagram...

Nice round-up at the bottom of the page:

In the end, the Boneyard gets us all.

There's an even larger (huge, in fact) graveyard in Tucson, Arizona:

https://www.google.com/maps/@32.1589671,-110.8350419,2145m/d...

That "graveyard" is more of a military base (which it is), where they reassemble planes from spares (when they can), preserve others for parts, and scrap the rest. Most of the money is made from the first two activities, and the facility is highly profitable.

They give bus tours of the facility from the adjacent fantastic PIMA Air & Space museum; I highly recommend visiting both when you can.

How do they actually bring the planes to that location? Road transport or do they have at least a runway?

Likely both. I've done work with a aerospace client close by and they were telling me there's a run way there (MHV). There's also a Burning Man camp that aquired a plane from here and drove it out.

They fly them in, where they are officially handed over to a third party for possibly resale, but more than likely cannibalization and the scrapping.

American Airlines retired 20 MD-80s at once last year and documented the whole thing. [0] You can also search #Super80Sendoff on Twitter to see thoughts at the time. [1] They sent theirs to Roswell, New Mexico I think, but it's the same general idea.

[0] https://airwaysmag.com/airchive/american-retires-20-md-80/

[1] https://twitter.com/hashtag/Super80Sendoff

Really enjoyed the airwaysmag.com article, thanks. The article was meticulously put together with obvious passion for the field and the people who work in it. Even the reading experience on mobile was pretty good which is unusual these days. I was surprised by one or two details, including the fact that some of these quintessential American airliners were actually manufactured in China, as long as 25 years ago.

> I was surprised by one or two details, including the fact that some of these quintessential American airliners were actually manufactured in China, as long as 25 years ago.

It's rumored in aviation circles that COMAC secretly reused the MD-80 jigs and tooling to develop the ARJ21 [0], which bears a strong resemblance to the DC-9/MD-80 series jets.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_ARJ21

Thank you very much for sharing the airwaysmag article. Can't believe how emotional I felt reading it.

Very well written.

Is this where Mythbusters did their "explosive decompression" episode?

I used to drive past this all the time. It’s quite a sight, even from the road.

A developed country should dismantle its planes and not let them rot in the nature just because its easy. My two cents.

This is not a landfill it's a junkyard, there is a difference. These planes are still valuable in several ways. They can be salvaged for parts to update operating planes. And some of them can be returned to service, though obsolete by modern standards. Unlike automobiles there aren't millions of any of these planes, only hundreds or thousands. It doesn't take up that much space to keep a bunch of obsolete planes laying around in the desert, and they may prove valuable in the future. Reduce, reuse, recycle, and all that.

I get your point, but lets be realistic for a second: These planes were not put there for altruistic reasons. But rather because it is much cheaper to simply forget them :)

That's why this location was chosen - the environmental conditions there (arid) mean the aircraft don't rot, like they would if they were stored somewhere else.

And they aren't forgotten - they'll stay parked there a little while until a disposition can be decided - whether to be immediately recycled (no historic value, no other aircraft of that type in service anywhere in the world, and so on), or to be left mostly intact for future parts reclamation.

Should say 2015.

It has been a bone yard long before 2015 and will be for long after.

It is convention, on HN, to mention the year that articles were written (if not the current year), whether or not the subject matter is changing rapidly.

It is not.

It is, the moderators even regularly edit the titles to add this where it is missing. random example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16128592

Added. Thanks!

the cross-sections always strike me with the number of parts which are involved and thus the amount of labor to build the planes body, wings, etc. with accompanying question of whether it can be simpler or done in other ways, like 3d printing, robotic assembly, etc.

3D printing materials currently aren't strong enough to use as most aircraft structural components. New aircraft designs are switching from aluminum to carbon fiber which has to be molded and bonded in sheets (totally unsuitable for 3D printing). Robots are already used where they make sense.

This may sound...whacky..but has anyone ever considered some of these fuselages could be turned into homeless housing somewhere?

Seems like it would have all the problems of housing in a shipping container, but at 10x the cost

I'd be concerned about hazardous materials remediation.

Nice idea but aircraft and houses are solutions to rather different problems.

Assume an aircraft is a very large cigar tube with wings, tail and wheels on stilts. So, start by cutting off the wings and tail and seal the holes. You need to remove the wheels and fix the thing down so that it wont blow away in a strong wind. It is probably too long for one family, so it will need partitioning or chopping up and the ends stoppered. You'll also need external doors - ideally at least two per dwelling for fire safety. You can't open the windows so those will need sorting out. You probably will want to divide up the living/sleeping/food prep/lav areas. You need plumbing, potentially heating and/or cooling. At least it wont rust, being aluminium. However, being ali. means that alterations will cost a fortune. You can't put steel and ali directly together (Galvanic) and any alterations that puncture the skin will need very careful waterproofing.

I'd go for something like this instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissen_hut They are very cheap to build and are not just for military use.

Shipping containers could be another choice for temporary budget housing and is modular. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_container_architect...

I bet it'd be like using shipping containers, but more expensive. And the shipping containers aren't inexpensive to begin with, once you add the doors, windows, insulation, heating, cooling, plumbing, electrical, etc.

Or land to put the darn thing on, for that matter.

But you can always move them easily using existing unmodified way of transport..

Homelessness is more a problem due to a lack of land, than due to a lack of housing materials.

Its more due to government regulations, like zoning and rent controls than anything else.

You betcha they have: http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/bangkok-plane-graveyard/in...

Housing, but at the other end of the spectrum: http://davidhertzfaia.com/747-wing-house/

Oy. Please don't. Homes for the homeless ideas are always whacky, always terribly substandard and... Just plain terrible.

When homeless people get into housing, they are no longer homeless. Done.

Yes, we need more affordable housing. But if it isn't something "normal" people would find desirable, don't start dreaming up ways to let homeless people live in it.

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