I was walking down an old residential part of Vegas a few days ago, when lo and behold! I spotted the gutted out remnants of an old TWA airplane in someone’s backyard.
My first thought was “Wicked!” followed shortly thereafter by “Where can I get me one?”
I’ve always had a thing for airplanes. I’d imagine that every travelholic does. It’s encoded in our DNA to develop life-long obsessions with any and all forms of transportation: planes, trains and automobiles, sail boats and steamboats, covered wagons, donkeys, you name it.
After google searching “how to buy an old plane” and coming up with nothing, I stumbled across photos of an airplane boneyard in Arizona, just a few hour drive from where I live in Las Vegas. Apparently, part of an old but still operating airport in the Mojave desert has become a dumping ground for planes that have been put out to pasture. Some of the planes are still flyable, others are damaged beyond repair and still others have been stripped of their parts; their stomachs ripped open and their skelitle remains left to rot under the desert sun.
What’s left of the former fighter planes and commercial jets make for an unsettling scene: Hundreds of plane carcases, in various degrees of decay, parked haphazardly behind a barb-wired fence; as if a mysterious plague suddenly swept through the fleet, permantly grounding them all. From the photos, the boneyard looks very reminiscent of both Lost and every doomsday science fiction movie I watched on TV as a kid.
It’s totally creepy and I want to go there!
- “Convair 240 in Arizona Boneyard” by Phillip C
It’s too bad that part of the airport isn’t open to the public. The only way I’d ever be able to tour the boneyard is if I find a way to sneak onto the tarmac or else bribe or befriend someone who works there.
For more photos and to read an explanation on how one photographer managed to talk his way in, check out this site: http://blogs.static.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/33186.html
