Yes, there’s Cotswold Airport (formerly Kemble Airfield) in Gloucestershire which is Europe’s leading European aircraft decommissioning facility. Are there any aeroplane boneyards in the UK? The facility can cope with the biggest of the big, including the colossal Airbus A380, the Boeing 747 and 777. and caters to Asia-Pacific carriers as well as several other airlines from elsewhere around the globe. The site is operated by Asia Pacific Aircraft Storage (APAS) Ltd. Once again, this is a very dry part of the world so its geographic location and terrain is ideal for the job. The facility was completed in 2013 with operations beginning in June of 2014. For example, Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia was the first large-scale aircraft boneyard to exist outside the United States. Although the US has the largest number of domestic aircraft boneyards, they do exist in other parts of the world as well. Of course, commercial airliners need a final resting place too. In fact, it’s home to nearly 4,000 aircraft, which makes it the largest aircraft storage and preservation facility in the world. As you can see from the image, it contains A LOT of aircraft. Perhaps the daddy of the scrap plane world is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (309th AMARG) which is a United States Air Force aircraft and missile storage and maintenance facility in Tucson, Arizona located on Davis–Monthan Air Force Base. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Amber Porter, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons The hard desert floor means that the planes won’t sink and the ground doesn’t need to be paved (which saves a fortune).Less rain reduces corrosion meaning that parts can be stored for longer without being damaged.Most of them are located in very dry, arid regions such as deserts for mainly two reasons: Typical locationĪt our scrapyard, it doesn’t really matter if it rains or shines (it rains mainly!) but for an aviation scrap facility, it does. Although some of the aircraft are simply there to be kept in storage, the vast majority of them are kept for their spare parts and for the value of the metal they’re made of. Regarding what happens next, as you’d expect, it’s remarkably similar to what we do. Virtually all planes are retired from the skies eventually, perhaps with the exception of historic aircraft like the Spitfire or Lancaster Bomber for example. ![]() Often called an aviation “boneyard” (or graveyard), it’s the place where aircraft are taken to once their natural service life comes to an end. Nevertheless, we still thought it’d be interesting to take a look at what happens at an aviation scrapyard and how it differs from what we do on a daily basis. We don’t get many aircraft in our scrapyard – well, NONE to be precise.
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