AIRPLANE BONEYARD
What happens to a plane when its time is up?
Right now, somewhere in the sky, a jetliner is burning through 15 litres of fuel per nautical mile, ferrying 200 passengers from one city to another. In about 30 years that same aircraft will be sitting motionless in the Arizona sun, engines pulled, windows taped over, slowly being harvested for parts. Welcome to the boneyard. It’s a fascinating place and yet almost nobody talks about it.
Desert Time Capsule
The Sonoran Desert outside Tucson, Arizona hosts the world’s most famous airplane graveyard – the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, known simply as AMARG. Across the Atlantic, in the dry plains of Teruel, Spain, a similar facility holds hundreds of commercial jets in long, silent rows. These aren’t junkyards. They’re parking lots.
The desert isn’t an accidental location. Its low humidity is the secret ingredient. Moisture is the enemy of metal – it breeds rust, degrades seals and eats through wiring. In Tucson and Teruel, the air is so dry that a plane can sit untouched for years and still be airworthy. A plane in Arizona ages 10 times slower than a plane in Singapore. The desert is essentially a giant pause button, and the aviation industry knows exactly how to press it.
When COVID-19 grounded global aviation almost overnight in 2020, airlines didn’t just park their planes at the gate. They drove them out to the desert in convoys. At the peak, over 16,000 commercial aircraft were out of service worldwide. The boneyards swelled. Some of those planes came back. Many never did.
Parting Out
Here’s the part that surprises people: retiring a plane isn’t a loss. Done right, it’s a windfall. A single CFM56 engine, the workhorse turbofan found on Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s, can be worth well over USD10 million on the used parts market. One aircraft might carry two of them. Strip out the avionics, the landing gear, the auxiliary power unit, and suddenly you’re not looking at a dead machine. You’re looking at a parts catalogue worth more than the aircraft itself.
This is the art of ‘parting out’ and it’s an entire industry. Specialist companies buy retired airframes, methodically disassemble them, certify each component and feed them back into the global supply chain. Airlines, MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) facilities and leasing companies all buy used parts. It’s cheaper than new, and – when properly certified – just as safe. Think of it as the ultimate organ donation programme, except the organs are turbine blades and hydraulic actuators, and the recipients are airlines trying to keep ageing fleets flying for less.
Shadow Economy
The secondary aviation parts market is worth an estimated USD4 to 6 billion annually, yet most travellers have no idea it exists. Every time you board a plane, there’s a quiet chance that some component – a valve, a sensor, a fuel pump – was pulled from a plane that last flew years ago, then certified, cleaned and reinstalled.
The boneyards are the beating heart of this shadow economy. They absorb excess capacity during downturns, preserve value during market shifts and release parts back when demand spikes. Airlines and lessors watch the used parts market the way traders watch commodity prices. Timing matters enormously.
Second Wind
There’s something sad about a boneyard, even if you understand the economics. These machines were engineered to defy gravity, to cross oceans in hours, to connect people across impossible distances. Now they sit in the silence of the desert, stripped and still, waiting.
But look closer. Inside those empty engine housings and bare fuselages, there’s still motion – parts travelling on to repair shops, hangars, runways. These planes may have stopped flying. But their parts’ journey continues.
This article is featured in the September 2026 issue of AirAsia’s in-flight magazine redcap.
For more stories, kindly read my latest book, A Pilot’s Story. More details are found