Short title

In mid-day heat of the arid Sonoran desert sit the remains of a Boeing 747 airliner at the storage facility at Mojave, California. Here, the fate of the world's retired civil airliners is decided by age or a cooling economy and are either cannibalised for still-working parts or recycled for scrap, their aluminium fuselages worth more than their sum total. After a lifetime of safe commercial flight, wings are clipped and cockpits sliced apart by huge guillotines, cutting through their once-magnificant engineering. Picture from the 'Plane Pictures' project, a celebration of aviation aesthetics and flying culture, 100 years after the Wright brothers first 12 seconds/120 feet powered flight at Kitty Hawk,1903. .

Filename

aviation_graveyard02-16-03-2008-15-08-1998.jpg

Copyright

Richard Baker

Image Size

4254x4362 / 10.7MB

USA mid-day blue sky civil airliner jet aircraft jet commerce trade international commercial aviation remains industrial economy anatomy inner opened fate forgotten gutted Sonora desert heat laid bare disembodied relics dump retired junk scrap yard dead end equipment fuselage air frame parts end of service re-usable recycle scrap aluminium metalic facility California Mojave desert arid worthless old decline end of the line terminated era historic bygone archaeology technology airliners commercial storage lifeless useless redundant ruins boneyard graveyard airline air transport air travel aircraft aviation flight plane planes transport transportation airbus Boeing circuit analog old technology eletronics chaotic jumble cockpit wiring flight-engineer engineering sky section nose scrub dust cut-away sliced 747 jumbo jet fence california mojave airfield airport distant afternoon landscape abandoned relic pallets raised hulk undignified wasteland old-age transcontinental

Contained in galleries

Aviation Junkyards, Jumbo Jet