Ask the pilot

The Mojave "boneyard" is a Mad Max vista of rugged brown earth, airline hulks and the machinery used to disembowel them. This is where jetliners come to die.

By Patrick Smith

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Aug. 4, 2006 | The wing is shorn off. It lies upside down in the dirt amid a cluster of desert bushes. The flaps and slats are ripped away, and a nest of pipes sprouts from the engine attachment pylon like the flailing innards of some immense dead beast. Several yards to the west, the center fuselage has come to rest inverted, the cabin cracked open like an eggshell. Inside, shattered rows of overhead bins are visible through a savage tangle of cables, wires, ducts and insulation. Seats are flung everywhere, still attached to one another in smashed-up units of two and three. I come to a pair of first-class chairs, crushed beneath the remains of a thousand-pound bulkhead. In the distance, the plane's tail sits upright in a gesture of mutilated repose, twisted sharply to one side. High on the fin, the blue and white logo remains visible, save for a large vacant portion where the rudder used to be.

Total casualties: zero.

But this is no tale of miracle survival, because where I'm standing isn't the scene of a catastrophic plane crash at all. Rather, I'm taking in one of the aviation world's most curious and fascinating places, the "boneyard" at Mojave Airport in California, 70 miles north of Los Angeles.

The Mojave Desert is a barren place, a region of forbidding rocky hills and centuries-old Joshua trees. But it's also an area with a rich aerospace history. Edwards Air Force Base and the U.S. Navy's China Lake weapons station are both here, as well as the airport in Palmdale, where the Lockheed L-1011 was built. The Mojave Airport, officially known as the Mojave Airport and Civilian Aerospace Test Center, is the first FAA-licensed "spaceport" in the United States, home to a burgeoning commercial spacecraft industry. It's a spot for ingenuity and innovation, you could say. But for hundreds of commercial jetliners, it is also the end of the road.

Of several aircraft scrap yards and storage facilities, including others in Arizona, Oklahoma and elsewhere in California, Mojave is arguably the most famous. I say "famous," but that's the aero-enthusiast speaking. There aren't many people who'll grasp the meaningfulness of what is essentially a blighted desertscape of derelict and mothballed jetliners, many of them in rather violent stages of disassembly. It's a hot, ugly, noisy place -- a Mad Max vista of rugged brown earth, airliner hulks and the machinery used to disembowel and break them up. Even for me, the idea of a pilgrimage to this strange place is difficult to understand. Do automobile enthusiasts seek out junkyards, to watch their favorite cars being pulverized into scrap metal? Perhaps they do, but as an aero-buff, peering above my head at the half-dismantled tail of a Continental Airlines DC-10, I feel like a horseracing aficionado at a rendering plant, where his beloved filly is about to be made into glue.

Then again, the Mojave boneyard is the closest thing anywhere to an airliner cemetery -- a place of final resting, and for paying final respects to some of civil aviation's most storied aircraft.

There are upward of 200 planes at Mojave, though the number rises and falls as hulls are destroyed -- or returned to service. Not all of the inventory is permanently grounded or slated for destruction. Neither are the planes necessarily old. Aircraft are taken out of service for a host of reasons, and age, strictly speaking, isn't always one of them. The west side of the airport is where most of the newer examples are parked. MD-80s, Fokker 100s and an assortment of later-model 737s line the sunbaked apron in a state of semiretirement, waiting for potential buyers. They wear the standard uniform of prolonged storage: liveries blotted out, intakes and sensor probes wrapped and covered to protect them from the ravages of climate -- and from the thousands of desert jackrabbits that make their homes here. A few of the ships are literally brand new, flown straight to Mojave from the assembly line to await reassignment after a customer changed its plans. For a while, in the capacity downturn that followed Sept. 11, Mojave brimmed with factory-fresh Boeings and Airbuses deferred here until business picked up or new owners could be found.

Most of the Mojave inventory, however, is one way or another obsolete. Some will make it out of here to again haul passengers and cargo. Many will not. Those in the east-side boneyard have, with very few exceptions, flown for the last time. Adjacent to a 40-year-old DC-8 freighter rests a 767 no more than half that age. I pick out the colors of Ansett, a defunct Australian carrier that was one of Boeing's first customers for the wide-body twin in the early 1980s. Like the old Douglas parked next door, the 767 is engineless, rudderless and destined for the crusher. The scrap value of a carcass is anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000.

"New arrivals, as it were, tend to come in bunches," explains Mike Potter, one of several Mojave proprietors. "I'm expecting a dozen or so DC-9s from a Mexican carrier any day now." Potter and the others, each with his own little parcel of desert, take custody of mothballed aircraft on behalf of the owners, or buy them outright to be scrapped or parted out. It's a secretive, tightknit group. One person I spoke to describes Mojave's custodians as a sort of desert mafia. The aircraft are off limits without specific permission and their minders are known to charge exorbitant fees for Hollywood crews that frequently use the site for film shoots.

With prior arrangement and a good excuse -- I was there with a documentary film crew working for the Discovery Channel -- Potter will escort you to the boneyard in his pickup. Before heading out, he delivers an overheated sermon on the dangers of skulking around derelict airplanes: jagged metal, loose parts, corrosive fluids, rattlesnakes.

Potter is a retired TWA pilot who, at age 23 according to his own boast, was the world's youngest captain at a major airline. Potter's first jet was the Convair 880, a four-engine relic similar in design to the more successful 707 and DC-8. No 880s exist anywhere in flyable condition, but several ancient examples are strewn around Mojave in varying degrees of disassembly, including one now in the hands of preservationists. In some cases, these are the very same ships piloted by Potter almost five decades ago. He keeps one, which he owns outright, in semi-serviceable, if not exactly flyable condition (it has, among other handicaps, no engines). "We periodically apply electrical power," he says, "to keep the lights and gauges working." The faded profile of TWA's twin globe trademark still adorns the tail. The logo is in slightly better condition than the one on the hat that Potter wears around the field -- a toy captain's cap with a brim encrusted with plastic rhinestones. Potter is, let's just say, a large fellow, with a waterfall white beard and a way of speaking that is both warmly engaging and hotly irascible. He's got the looks of Karl Marx, the raffish drawl of Chuck Yeager and a touch of charismatic nuttiness.

Potter seems professionally detached from the machines he so obviously loves, but yet, according to the rules of his job, must occasionally destroy. Motioning toward a sun-bleached row of planes, there's a sad seriousness in his eyes -- like a marine biologist encountering a pod of stranded whales on a beach.

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