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Comment by rickdangerous1 | Hacker News Reader

This is a terrifyingly large amount of capital sitting in one place. The part of me that wants to mitigate risk is thinking, maybe these planes should be spreadout around the country a bit. I guess there are no tornados in this area...but one freak weather event and a couple trillion dollars gets mangled into scrap?

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What kind of weather event are you thinking of? I think airplanes are typically designed to withstand high winds. The weather in this region is dry, and that's really the only word that can describe it. On top of that, we're at the beginning of the dry season. It's more likely a landing plane accidentally crashes into these parked planes than the weather leaves us with a trillion dollars of mangled scrap.

What about arson?

the planes are rather far apart from each other and alumininum isn't the most flammable thing. Also there is about 300-1km cordon around the whole thing with warning signs saying "this is national security area", and it's so sparse that it's probably rather effectively surveiled by about 3-4 people unless, say, 1000 people try to do arson at the same time.

Apparently theft of radar equipment is more of a thing than arson.

Not just aluminium, the whole plane is designed to make it hard to catch fire.

Isn't this a region that's incredibly prone to wildfires?

Airports aren’t generally very wooded areas... and the SCLA is in basically scrub land with barely enough vegetation for a good brush fire.

Maybe a comet impact? Use your apocalyptic imagination to find the scenario most likely to you?

Not worth a couple trillion dollar. One plane is 250 million, and I reckon there were 150 of them. So, 35-40 billions.

Fair enough. I'm must admit that I haven't been into an airliner dealership lately so I've lost track of the current prices.

I thought I heard the airfield controller say there were 400+ and that they expected 50+ from Southwest soon.

My first thought was about the concentrated value and something like an earthquake or a plane crash. My second thought was "how long would it take to replace one of these planes?" but I guess an airline could replace it within hours due to the Boeing delivery backlog, but likely won't need to because of the lack of demand for travel right now.

Not a trillion, but still expensive.

Not really.

Even 100 737s in one place wouldn't crack $20 gigabucks. And the 787-8, one of the most expensive planes, only costs about two 737s.

There is far more capital in parts of Manhattan or wafer processing warehouses than commercial jets could be valet parked at a civilian international airport.

I had the same thought. That's amazing to have billions of dollars of aircraft just sitting in one place.

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