By Peter Hossli (text) and Robert Huber (photos)
Christmas comes just after New Years Eve for David Kramer, scrap dealer. He predicts that the tourist traffic breaks up just after New Years from its holiday peak. “We tear apart what’s left over.” Kramer lives from filleting airplanes down to their skeleton and sawing them into flat panels hardly as big as a door.
The future looks rosy for the demolition specialist. “I’m booked out for years to come.” Kramer has established himself at the Mojave Airport, an isolated nest in the Californian desert, three hours north of Los Angeles. The only things there besides the airport are musty old motels and a few petrol stations for lorry drivers. On the bare hills are thousands of windmills generating energy.
What Mojave does have is a parking lot. Well over three hundred with aluminium foil and duct tape, mothballed and stranded jets glisten in the morning light. The colours are beautiful and bizarre. Lined up behind the fence are a dozen Boeings from Hawaiian Airlines, three Swissair Machines Type MD11 and over ninety planes from the bankrupt US Airways. All point their noses to the wind, to protect the wings and taped up windows from the powerful desert storms. Most of the tailfins have been painted over “because of the image”, says Kramer. “If passengers see in the media that a plane is parked in the sand they immediately think that the airline is in trouble.”
A stop sign on the runway reminds drivers to grant right of way to landing airplanes. Safety is upheld here. The premises are surrounded by barbed wire. Officially photographers are not permitted entrance. If someone pulls out a camera, a security guard approaches.
It looks eerie and sad when airplanes – machines that exist to fly – are just standing here en masse. “At least a third of the airplanes in Mojave will never start again”, says Kramer, who has torn apart over eighty passenger jets in the past four years. Airlines have greatly reduced global over-capacity. Since maintenance costs are rising every year, the airlines can save money by mothballing and then dismantling the machines.
It happens in the desert - where not much lives anyway. Mojave is very dry and is 1000 metres above sea level. It hardly ever rains. Expensive hangars are unnecessary. The airplanes don’t rust outdoors. The sandy ground is rock hard, even jumbo jets don’t sink here. Land is in abundance and it’s cheap.
A sawed-off, half-round piece of a jumbo jet serves as Dale Lackey’s office. On the east corner of the Mojave Airport he has leased a piece of the desert. Lackey works for Kramer the scrap merchant and screws off a number of airplane components that can be resold. Heaps of cables lie around. He uses three separated airplane noses as boundary markers. In the middle of the premises stands a Boeing-737 laid out on railway sleepers. Already sold is the chassis, minus the transmission, that’s the most valuable part of an old plane. One leg can cost up to a million dollars. On a tailfin we can spot the outline of a painted over maple leaf. Lackey is dismantling an Air Canada B-737. A labourious and sometimes - slow process. Seven days of the week, six men lever and hammer three months long – just to take out parts. For a Boeing-747, the largest passenger jet in the desert, ten men gnaw for 120 days. Like vultures, the workers prey on the limp planes. First they unscrew the chassis and place the tons-heavy fuselage on wooden rails or steel stilts. Then they take apart what is recyclable – the seat rows, the cockpit electronics, the many kilometres of cables, wing flaps, fins, doors toilets, black boxes, entertainment installations, the galley, wheels, brakes, even the wing flaps and rudders.
Every component that will fly again is labelled. Noted are the type of airplane and airline, the number of take-offs and landings as well as flight hours. Before a wing is allowed back in the air, it is inspected first by the strict US aviation regulation board, the FAA. The life of every screw has to be examined. Thousands of pages are compiled with the official data from each airplane. If a component gets the FAA approval seal, it is then registered in databanks and traded via business-to-business websites worldwide. The majority find buyers in developing countries.
Every ten years the industry finds itself in a crisis, says Lackey, who’s been unscrewing jets apart for the last thirty years. He points to two wing flaps that he’s just separated from an Air-Canada jet. He emptied almost 2000 litres of kerosene from the completely pumped out Canadian airplane. In 747 jets he “finds” around 8000 litres. Lackey delivers the petrol to a refinery on the West Coast who can recycle the kerosene new. In this ground-air-cycle, everything that has even a small amount of value is recycled and flows back in. From the thousands of kilometres of cable the scrap workers salvage out the valuable copper. What used to steer the tailfin will in future be a gutter for rain.
From the windowless portholes of the stranded 737 hangs silver insulation material. The interior is empty, only wires run along the ceiling. On the ground lie oxygen masks and an old women’s magazine, as if the last passenger forgot it when exiting.
The next day the octopus is ordered, it’s a digger equipped by Kramer with sharp incisors. Patiently the giant scissors munch their way through the airplane hull and tear it in to handy pieces. Kramer ships these to Asia. The environmental regulations concerning melting aluminium in the USA are too strict now.
The majority of the airlines want nothing to do with the dismantling business. They hire others for the dirty work. “It’s always a mess”, says Kramer. “For the airlines it’s incredibly emotional”, he says, “For us every plane is just a piece of scrap metal.”
The owner alone decides how a jet is disassembled. That is rarely the airlines, whose logo is stamped on the tailfin. Airplanes belong to banks or leasing firms. The largest owner of airplanes at the moment is GE Capital. Jumbo jets are bought by GE Capital for around 180 million dollars and then rented monthly to the airlines for $300,000.
At the moment a number of rental contracts for B-747s are running out, so there’s intense activity in Marana, a desert hicksville in Arizona, eight driving hours or 1000 kilometres away from Mojave. Evergreen Air Centre, the world’s largest maintenance centre, parking lot and dismantling firm is specialised here for Jumbos. Trevor Van Horn, an energetic grey-haired man with a belly, is president here. He knows the aviation business well since he has founded two airlines companies.
Van Horn describes the US industry’s situation since 9/11 as “miserable”. They will lose many billions of dollars. The airlines will reach 80 percent of their profits with a fifth of the passengers, the business class travellers. Because reservations have been constantly decreasing since May 2001, flights have had to be reduced and planes recycled. Airlines suffered billions of dollars of losses. Only because they parked so many planes in the desert they’re starting to break even now. Companies that are dependant on frequent flyers have bought private airplanes. As a result, often small commuter planes are ending up in the shredder.
The firm that dismantles an old plane determines what it’s worth. Discretion is mandatory, and names of customers are taboo. The privately run companies do not give out turnover information or prices. For a 747 without the engine and chassis, Evergreen pays around 250,000 dollars. Scrap metal and spare parts sell for around a million dollars. A 747 motor brings in around six million dollars and a black box 250,000 dollars. The prices fell when “United Airlines went bankrupt”. The world’s second largest carrier put dozens in the desert in 2003, a large portion of which are being dismantled now.
The firm earns well with special orders. Last year they detached a jumbo jet’s nose that had only a single tear. A flight school erected a simulator inside. Because it was a rush job no one bothered to clear out the jet first. A diamond-scissor digger cut through the middle of the aluminium torso, the doors, the business class, the kitchen for the first class passengers, the luggage room and the cables. Since then the body lies there, headless, with its guts hanging out, surrounded by dozens of 747 wrecks. On the upper right side a solitary oxygen mask dangles alone.
An hour south of Marana, on the east city side of Tucson is the absolute largest parking lot for disused flight objects – the Davis Mathon Air Force Base. Nearly 5000 mothballed military machines, combat helicopters, jets and transporters are parked on the rock hard desert sand. All of the models that the US Military has flown over the last fifty years are parked here in rank and file, neater and more orderly than at the private parking lots. The US Air Force has jets freshened up here. At the moment they are working on a squadron black B-1 Bomber. It laid the bomb carpets in Afghanistan and Iraq and is now being spruced up for a possible Iran campaign.
The Davis Mathon Air Force Base has plenty of experience in the destruction of planes. As part of the disarmament agreement Start I the USA was obliged to destroy 362 Type B-52 Bombers. A guillotine beheaded plane after plane until last year. The remnants had to be left for 90 days out in the open, so that Russian scouting satellites could verify the demolition. Still there are minced B-52’s lying around as spare parts for the bombers that are still flying.
Canadian environmentalists are thinking of a completely different way of disposing of jets in the future. They threw a complete, hollowed out plane in the Pacific near Vancouver. Fish are already frolicking within. Soon a reef should grow on the aluminium. “An environmentally friendly solution”, says scrap metal dealer Kramer. He’s worried however about new jets. They are being manufactured from synthetic mixtures – and don’t melt as easily as Coke cans.
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