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Psst, wanna buy a jumbo jet?
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Psst, wanna buy a jumbo jet?
You'll probably find the company that owned them has gone bust and that no-one now claims responsibility for them. Either that or they have been deliberately dumped and forgotten about. It happens more often than you might think, private airfields are littered with small aircraft whose owners no longer fly or who have died.
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Psst, wanna buy a jumbo jet?
Reading the article two of them were leased by Malaysian Airlines' freight arm, from an Icelandic freight carrier which was leasing them already. They'd call that a sub-lease if it was a building.
Both airlines say the leases are no longer running. Maybe the leasing company went bust. Alternatively: they are 747-200s rather than 747-400s which passenger airlines still using 747s might want. They are set up for freight, and could be pretty old so maybe they're just not worth enough for anyone to keep them maintained or try and flog/lease them.
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Psst, wanna buy a jumbo jet?
A good number planes, engines and components are leased. The leasing of them is actually pretty fascinating - very unique market.
Though the idea that you might just leave a plane somewhere for a while is more common than you might think.
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Psst, wanna buy a jumbo jet?
Of course, Caja's pic is of the Boneyard in Tucson, which only has military planes.
If you drive half an hour north from there on I-10, you get to the Pinal airpark where lots of airlines and leasing companies leave commercial planes.
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Psst, wanna buy a jumbo jet?
A lot of European airlines base their flying schools around there, too. Not only is the climate good for the equipment, but you almost always have peak flying conditions.
A friend who flies for Lufthansa has very fond memories of Arizona, which was a very alien landscape to someone who grew up in the Rhineland.
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Psst, wanna buy a jumbo jet?
ursus arctos wrote: A lot of European airlines base their flying schools around there, too. Not only is the climate good for the equipment, but you almost always have peak flying conditions.
A friend who flies for Lufthansa has very fond memories of Arizona, which was a very alien landscape to someone who grew up in the Rhineland.
I think there are a handful more of these in the California and Arizona desert. I remember driving past Victorville and seeing a bunch on the ground; and a long time ago driving past Mojave Air And Space Port (which surely is one of the best named things on the planet), and again seeing loads of planes just sitting around.
The tour of the Tucson one is fascinating, although you're not allowed out of the bus to go and tromp around, sadly. It turns out that some of the planes are in storage. But most are either being cannibalised for parts, or decommissioned, or just left visible to satellites as part of arms control treaties. Among the planes being broken down when I was there were a handful of the very last F-14 Tomcats, which they were obliged to destroy to make sure that the Iranians couldn't get spare parts for the ones the Shah bought in the 70s.
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