Desert Solitaire: Inside an ‘Airplane Graveyard’
Travel Blog • Rob Verger • 04.08.09 | 12:54 PM ET
Photo by A sign that the airline industry is struggling in the poor economy: airlines are putting more planes into storage. “The number of planes in storage has jumped 29% in the past year to 2,302,” the AP reports.
Both this week’s AP story and a February 2006 New York Times story by Joe Sharkey take readers inside the Evergreen Maintenance Center in Arizona, with vivid descriptions of the rows of planes parked in the desert. Each article uses the word “ghost” or “ghosts” to describe the feeling of the motionless planes.
But both stories also quickly point out that these are not places where airplanes just go to die. “The people who run these facilities chafe at the idea that they’re groundskeepers in a graveyard,” the AP story notes. “While Evergreen scraps roughly 15 planes a year, most of the stored planes still get checks, extensive record-keeping and federally mandated maintenance that will let them return to service if travel demand and the price of jet fuel cooperate in the future.”
Let’s hope that they do.