For the Great Airliners, a Graveyard in the Desert
By JOE SHARKEY
MARANA, Ariz.
WE are driving slowly under a long canopy formed by the shiny tails of Boeing 747's parked in the Sonoran Desert 20 miles west of Tucson. Beyond a vast expanse of desert and cactuses, mountain peaks rim the horizon. It's warm. More important, it's dry.
Looming around us is an amazing sight for any seasoned business traveler: row after row of silent, abandoned airliners, great jets that once soared over the earth. More than 300 are parked here. Some are going to be worked over and eventually resold to airlines around the world. Others are waiting for the banks or domestic airlines to reclaim them, and who knows when or if. Many are waiting for mechanics to strip away useable parts before wreckers tear apart the fuselages for aluminum.
"They'll turn them into beer cans," said Al Sharif, at the wheel of a red pickup truck, giving me a tour of the Evergreen Air Center at Pinal Air Park. It is one of the two major storage areas in the desert of the American Southwest for commercial jetliners orphaned by a struggling domestic airline industry or by plain old obsolescence. The other is in the Mojave Desert northeast of Los Angeles.
Mr. Sharif, the marketing vice president of Evergreen and an aeronautical engineer like his father, senses the presence of ghosts when he wanders through these ranks of jets, their engines sealed tight and their windows taped over against the sun and sand.
Sometimes he climbs the steps of one and enters the darkness, his flashlight piercing the gloom. The rows of seats look just like so many tombstones.
"The hairs on the back of my neck bristle," he said. "I can just feel the karma and the energy from the people who once sat in these seats and traveled the world. You just feel it as you make your way down the aisle." Parked on Evergreen's 20-million-square-foot storage area are some of the now-humbled giants of commercial flight. Here are dozens of 747's, some with their livery — the airlines' colors and logos — whitewashed out. Others still carry the colors.
Here, also, are some of the great airliners of a long-gone era when air travel was a thrill and not a burden: McDonnell Douglas DC-8's and 10's, Lockheed P3's and L-111's.
Here, too, are some direct casualties of the post-9/11 era in domestic flight: Boeing 737's, 757's and 767's, as well as Airbus A300's and A310's.
Mr. Sharif's favorite plane is the 747, which began flying in the late 1960's. He muses on that as we corner past a mothballed Northwest Airlines 757 still in vibrant livery. Desert dust makes a wake in our path.
"The 757 is a very good airplane, but if I had my druthers, I would rather fly on a 747 anyway because they're big and agile enough that you're not feeling the bumps in the road like on a smaller plane," he said.
That is the engineer in him talking. When I asked Evergreen if I could visit the air center (it is not open to the public and security is tight), I thought I would find merely a sad graveyard for planes.
But there is more to the operation than merely parking a plane to "preserve the asset" for an airline or bank or the wrecker.
Actually, 75 percent of Evergreen's revenue comes not from mothballing but from refurbishing, getting the planes back up to mechanical specification for recertification and resale. While domestic airlines cut their fleets, carriers in Asia and Europe are avidly shopping for used planes.
"After 9/11 hit, the airline industry suffered tremendously, so a lot of their aircraft came here, presumably to be used again," Mr. Sharif said. "At the same time, a lot of the classic older aircraft that weren't fuel-efficient were permanently removed from fleets and sent here."
Within 18 months of 9/11, Evergreen's work force of mechanics increased to about 600 from 280, he said. They have managed to return 150 aircraft to the skies, even as new ones keep coming in.
I have loved jetliners since I first rode on one, in 1964. It was a Delta flight, and it was thrilling. I don't recall the model of the aircraft, but I was certain that at least one of that model, perhaps the very plane I flew on, was out here in the desert.
"I know what you mean," said Robert McAndrew, the president of Evergreen and, like Mr. Sharif, a frequent business traveler.
"Some of these airplanes, when we do the final salvage like on some old TWA 747, I know in my gut that I myself have flown on them," he said. "Others arrive here looking like they've just come into the airport. A 747 came in not long ago with the newspapers and magazines all stacked neatly in the racks, and the pillows and blankets on the seats. It was eerie, like a ghost ship."
On the road appears each Tuesday. E-mail:
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