Parked

Airliners parked at Grant County International Airport

What makes this photo special is Grant County International Airport is a former SAC airbase in Moses Lake Washington. We've been there before.

Teruel Spain

Global weekly number of commercial airline flights before and after COVID-19

The number of commercial airlines flights has plummeted since the beginning of the year, which means airlines have been parking large numbers of aircraft in boneyards in out of the way locations like Victorville, California, Roswell, New Mexico and Marana, Arizona. But what about Europe? They aren't going to want to fly all their excess airplanes half way around the world just to park them.

Teruel Airport, Spain

No, they fly them to Teruel, Spain. I've always thought of Spain as being hot, dry and dusty like the American Southwest. Maybe not, but Teruel is. 

 Mudéjar Cathedral of Teruel

Turuel is a small town, famous for some fancy churches (above) and a big battle that was a turning point in the Spanish Civil War in 1938.

Via FlightAware, which links to CNN which I didn't link to because their page never stops loading.

P.S. Google Maps 3D function works on the hills around Teruel, but not on the buildings, unlike some more famous places.

Airplanes

Flight Aware's weekly newsletter always includes a bunch of photos. Most of them are usually airliners which don't hold much interest for me, but occasionally there are other things in there as well and today we got a bunch.

Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress
The B-17 has been mentioned here before, once or twice.

C-17 at St Maarten
These kind of photos are fairly common on Flight Aware, though
 the target is usually an airliner, not a military cargo aircraft.
The C-17 has been here before.

De Havilland Canada Twin Otter at Svetlaya
Svetlaya is on east coast of Russia, equidistant from Red China & Japan

North American F-100 Super Sabre at Oshkosh
This one is a real blast from the past. I had toy model of one when I was a kid,
and it will always be my ideal of what a jet fighter should look like.

COVID-19 strikes again
Alaska airliners parked at PDX

SHINMAYWA US-2 at Iwakuni, Japan,
possibly flying in from its normal operating base in the middle of the ocean.
Iwakuni is on Honshu, the main island.

Pic of the Day

Airliner graveyard in Victorville California

Google Maps provides almost the same view.

Airliner graveyard in Victorville California

More boneyard posts.
Via Posthip Scott

Skyhook

James Bond and Claudine 'boob-a-licious' Auger in Thunderball

All airports have airport codes. Anyone who has traveled by air in the USA is probably familiar with some of the big ones like Atlanta (ATL), Chicago (ORD), LA (does anyone even say Los Angeles anymore?) (LAX), Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) and Portland (PDX). Okay, not everyone knows PDX, I just threw that in there because I go there ten times a year. Even no account little podunk airports like Hillsboro (HIO, my neighborhood airport) and Pinal Airpark (MJZ), just North of Tuscon, have codes.

Pinal Airpark, Marana Arizona. Notice that you can see the entire 6,000 foot long runway AND you can count the airliners. Flippin' airliners are big.

    Iaman paid a visit to MJZ this week and saw a bunch of airliners parked there. Last year when Boeing's Dreamliner was grounded a bunch of them ended up here. Seems that since Boeing went to so much trouble to set up their international assembly line to build these planes, they were loath to shut it down just because the FAA says they weren't allowed to fly them. Well, they could fly them, they just weren't allowed to carry any passengers. I mean how else were they going to get them from their final assembly plant in Everett (just north of Seattle), Washington to Tuscon, which is where MJZ is?
    MJZ is currently the largest boneyard for civilian aircraft. Davis-Monthan Air Force Base is just down the road and it dwarfs Pinal by a factor of, oh, I dunno, a zillion to one or so. Typical Americans. Whine about having to pay an extra $50 for airfare but willingly fork over thousands of dollars every year so the Air Force's flyboys can go for joyrides anytime they want in their supersonic hotrods. That's democracy in action for you, although I fail to see how this aspect is any different than communism. Never mind, that's all beside the point. I'll try to stay on track here.
    There is another civilian boneyard in Roswell, New Mexico. They store old airlines, but they are also strong in the scrap metal business.

Pinal Airpark got it's start in WW2 training pilots for the military as part of the "50,000 pilot training program". During the Vietnam war it was home to the CIA's Intermountain Airlines. Intermountain eventually became part of Evergreen Aviation, based in McMinnville, Oregon (just down the road from here), which is where the Spruce Goose ended up.

     Robert Fulton started development of his skyhook there. Hard to tell how often it was used for real, I mean it was basically a clandestine activity. We do have videos from some of the tests and the ones in the movies. The Air Force kept it in their back pocket until 1996 when they finally decided to let it go.

There is also an automobile racetrack here. The local Porsche club seems to be only ones who use it.

Update July 2021 replaced missing video.

Roswell Boneyard

So I'm reading about the balloon launch scheduled to go off this morning in New Mexico, which reminds me of Felix's record setting jump from the Red Bull balloon last year about this time, which was also in New Mexico. Two balloon launches from New Mexico, gotta be the same place, right? Nope. One's in Fort Sumner, the other is in Roswell. Let's look at Roswell.


View Big Science in a larger map Gee willickers, there are a whole lot of airplanes parked there. That's not an Air Force Base, is it? No, it was one once, but now it's a boneyard for airliners


I don't much care for TV news, but this one report managed to squeeze in a whole bunch of numbers, numbers that you don't usually hear about.