The Mojave Boneyard: Where Airliners Go to Wait

The aircraft parked on the tarmac at the Mojave Air and Space Port are not flying. Some of them will fly again. Some will be parted out, their engines and avionics removed for use in other aircraft, their aluminum frames eventually recycled. Some are simply waiting, in the way that machines wait when their operators are unsure what comes next.

The Mojave Desert is the ideal storage environment for commercial aircraft. The combination of low humidity, consistent dry heat, and high elevation preserves aluminum airframes, rubber seals, and hydraulic systems better than any hangar in a humid climate. Airlines have been using Mojave for aircraft storage since the nineteen seventies. The inventory at any given time runs to several hundred aircraft, parked wing-to-wing in rows that stretch across the desert floor. Wide-body jets from airlines that no longer exist. Narrow-body planes pulled from service when fuel prices made them uneconomical.

On the same facility, sharing a fence line with the boneyard, the Mojave Air and Space Port has been one of the primary test sites for commercial space vehicle development since the early two thousands. On June twenty-first, two thousand four, SpaceShipOne, built by Scaled Composites, took off from Mojave and became the first privately funded spacecraft to carry a person above the one hundred kilometer boundary defining the edge of space. The flight lasted about twenty four minutes, longer than Chuck Yeager's sound-barrier flight fifty-seven years earlier, over the same general desert.

The boneyard and the spaceport occupy the same tarmac. One is an inventory of aviation's last era. The other is a prototype workshop for the next one. The desert makes no distinction between them.