Coronavirus: How the travel downturn is sending jet planes to ‘boneyards’

Coronavirus: How the travel downturn is sending jet planes to ‘boneyards’

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Commercial aeroplanes parked at the Mojave airport in California









Hit by the collapse in demand for flights due to Covid-19 commercial airlines have parked their grounded fleet in some of the most remote locations in the world.

Last week, Australia's flag carrier Qantas bid a fond farewell to its last Boeing 747 aeroplane and sent it in a final flight to retirement from Sydney to Mojave desert in California.

The fleet, according to a report, had carried more than 250 million people during almost half a century of service, including Queen Elizabeth II and every Australian Olympic team since 1984. The airline also announced it had decided to store its fleet of A380 super jumbos at a facility in Mojave desert until at least 2023.

Qantas said they had planned on retiring the plane in six months but brought forward the date because the coronavirus pandemic had "decimated international travel globally".

The pandemic has forced a large number of commercial airlines to ground their fleets in a handful of vast storage facilities around the world, some located in remote, arid deserts.

These places are variously called airline "boneyards" or