A1FlyBoy
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jan 11, 2002
- Posts
- 682
It's another perfect day in the boneyard: blue skies overhead, a sea of sand and cactus -- and rows of parked airplanes -- below. Trevor Van Horn smiles as he gazes out his office window. Another passengerless 747 descends toward the runway.
In his 33 years in the aircraft industry, Van Horn has started airlines and run them, bought airplanes and sold them. And so it's fitting that, at age 56, Van Horn is now president of Evergreen Air Center, a 1,600-acre swath of desert floor in Marana, Ariz., just a short hop north of the Mexican border. Here, Van Horn presides over the world's biggest parking lot for unwanted commercial aircraft. The boneyard is where airplanes come to die.
"We don't call it the boneyard," says Van Horn, the nose of a mothballed Air Atlanta 747-200 dominating the view from his office window. Everybody else does, though. Since calamity struck the airline industry in September, the little-known enterprise of storing, retiring, or scrapping unused planes has quickly become a booming business. Last spring Van Horn had 140 discarded planes on the lot; by January he expects to have 225. In all, nearly 1,000 planes have been grounded in the United States, Canada, and Mexico since September, eventually making their way to Evergreen and several other storage sites in the Southwest, where the warm, dry air serves as a cheap and effective airplane preservative.
According to the Air Transport Assn., available seat miles have dropped nearly 20 percent since the Sept. 11 attacks, and the industry has laid off more than 100,000 workers. The rapid slump and grim revenue forecasts have forced many airlines to ground dozens of older, less efficient planes, and even prompted manufacturers to mothball some brand-new but unsold jets -- "whitetails," in aviation parlance.
So the skies over Marana are filled with new arrivals. Lufthansa has a few 747s on the way. The German carrier Condor is sending some 757s. Van Horn has hired two new staffers to keep up with the logistics of parking and storing incoming planes. And to fend off potential terrorists who might be interested in nabbing a mothballed jet, he has installed new security sensors and barriers at the gate to protect the expanding inventory.
Evergreen has so many airplanes bearing the colors and logos of so many airlines, it resembles a sandy, inert version of O'Hare. Many will never fly again -- the oldest plane here, a Boeing 707, arrived in 1981 -- but Van Horn's operation stands to benefit regardless. Evergreen International, a privately held company based in McMinnville, Ore., grossed nearly $50 million on its Marana operations last year and currently oversees about $1 billion in "heavy assets" -- roughly 190 airplanes as of early November. When supply and demand get as out of whack as they are now, planes that cost the most to maintain relative to their value (usually older gas-guzzlers with higher maintenance costs) are the first to be unloaded. In November, for example, United retired its entire fleet of older 737s and some 727s, 99 planes in all.
About 20 percent of the dozens of wide-bodies now parked in Evergreen's "alpha row," mostly aging 747s and DC-10s, are simply "pickled": Workers drain them of fluids and tape their windows for storage. Airlines pay $750 to $5,000 a month for this service, but the total overhaul needed to get them airborne again, known as a C-check, costs about $1.5 million. Many of the other jumbos, meanwhile, are headed for the "cutting yard" at the north edge of the field. Five 747s are lined up in front of two huge contraptions called "the guillotine" and "the pincher," which will slice and dice the planes into beer-can-size scraps of aluminum. The process takes about four days -- "a lot less time," Van Horn says, "than it took to build 'em."
Evergreen strips as much as $5 million in reusable parts out of a typical 747, depending on the plane's age and condition, Van Horn says. A fuselage can go for about $20,000, and most of the other parts -- engines, cockpit electronics, flaps, struts, landing gear, and the like -- are refurbished and either sold back to the airline or put on a secondhand parts market estimated to be worth some $5 billion per year. Most working airplanes, Van Horn explains, are like octogenarians: They keep going with a rebuilt knee here, a hip replacement there. Still, as reliable as used plane parts may be, they're hardly something to advertise to jittery consumers -- which is why, as Van Horn puts it, "this is a pretty quiet industry."
Just about everything on this lot, in fact, is for sale. Van Horn prowls the field here like a used-car dealer peddling Pontiacs. Someone, somewhere, he insists, will surely want that MD-1011, still carrying the colors of its last owner, Eastern Airlines; or British Airways's first DC-10, signed by dozens of employees when it was retired.
Airplane buffs, he says, show up almost daily. But serious buyers are scrutinized carefully. Earlier this year, one client flew off with a 747 that had been sitting for months. The customer, which promised to pay within 30 days, went bankrupt; Evergreen lost $1 million on the deal. Van Horn has since enacted a new boneyard rule: Customers now must pay before a plane leaves the field. "We're like the place where you get your car fixed,'' he says. "We keep the keys until the bill gets paid.''
In his 33 years in the aircraft industry, Van Horn has started airlines and run them, bought airplanes and sold them. And so it's fitting that, at age 56, Van Horn is now president of Evergreen Air Center, a 1,600-acre swath of desert floor in Marana, Ariz., just a short hop north of the Mexican border. Here, Van Horn presides over the world's biggest parking lot for unwanted commercial aircraft. The boneyard is where airplanes come to die.
"We don't call it the boneyard," says Van Horn, the nose of a mothballed Air Atlanta 747-200 dominating the view from his office window. Everybody else does, though. Since calamity struck the airline industry in September, the little-known enterprise of storing, retiring, or scrapping unused planes has quickly become a booming business. Last spring Van Horn had 140 discarded planes on the lot; by January he expects to have 225. In all, nearly 1,000 planes have been grounded in the United States, Canada, and Mexico since September, eventually making their way to Evergreen and several other storage sites in the Southwest, where the warm, dry air serves as a cheap and effective airplane preservative.
According to the Air Transport Assn., available seat miles have dropped nearly 20 percent since the Sept. 11 attacks, and the industry has laid off more than 100,000 workers. The rapid slump and grim revenue forecasts have forced many airlines to ground dozens of older, less efficient planes, and even prompted manufacturers to mothball some brand-new but unsold jets -- "whitetails," in aviation parlance.
So the skies over Marana are filled with new arrivals. Lufthansa has a few 747s on the way. The German carrier Condor is sending some 757s. Van Horn has hired two new staffers to keep up with the logistics of parking and storing incoming planes. And to fend off potential terrorists who might be interested in nabbing a mothballed jet, he has installed new security sensors and barriers at the gate to protect the expanding inventory.
Evergreen has so many airplanes bearing the colors and logos of so many airlines, it resembles a sandy, inert version of O'Hare. Many will never fly again -- the oldest plane here, a Boeing 707, arrived in 1981 -- but Van Horn's operation stands to benefit regardless. Evergreen International, a privately held company based in McMinnville, Ore., grossed nearly $50 million on its Marana operations last year and currently oversees about $1 billion in "heavy assets" -- roughly 190 airplanes as of early November. When supply and demand get as out of whack as they are now, planes that cost the most to maintain relative to their value (usually older gas-guzzlers with higher maintenance costs) are the first to be unloaded. In November, for example, United retired its entire fleet of older 737s and some 727s, 99 planes in all.
About 20 percent of the dozens of wide-bodies now parked in Evergreen's "alpha row," mostly aging 747s and DC-10s, are simply "pickled": Workers drain them of fluids and tape their windows for storage. Airlines pay $750 to $5,000 a month for this service, but the total overhaul needed to get them airborne again, known as a C-check, costs about $1.5 million. Many of the other jumbos, meanwhile, are headed for the "cutting yard" at the north edge of the field. Five 747s are lined up in front of two huge contraptions called "the guillotine" and "the pincher," which will slice and dice the planes into beer-can-size scraps of aluminum. The process takes about four days -- "a lot less time," Van Horn says, "than it took to build 'em."
Evergreen strips as much as $5 million in reusable parts out of a typical 747, depending on the plane's age and condition, Van Horn says. A fuselage can go for about $20,000, and most of the other parts -- engines, cockpit electronics, flaps, struts, landing gear, and the like -- are refurbished and either sold back to the airline or put on a secondhand parts market estimated to be worth some $5 billion per year. Most working airplanes, Van Horn explains, are like octogenarians: They keep going with a rebuilt knee here, a hip replacement there. Still, as reliable as used plane parts may be, they're hardly something to advertise to jittery consumers -- which is why, as Van Horn puts it, "this is a pretty quiet industry."
Just about everything on this lot, in fact, is for sale. Van Horn prowls the field here like a used-car dealer peddling Pontiacs. Someone, somewhere, he insists, will surely want that MD-1011, still carrying the colors of its last owner, Eastern Airlines; or British Airways's first DC-10, signed by dozens of employees when it was retired.
Airplane buffs, he says, show up almost daily. But serious buyers are scrutinized carefully. Earlier this year, one client flew off with a 747 that had been sitting for months. The customer, which promised to pay within 30 days, went bankrupt; Evergreen lost $1 million on the deal. Van Horn has since enacted a new boneyard rule: Customers now must pay before a plane leaves the field. "We're like the place where you get your car fixed,'' he says. "We keep the keys until the bill gets paid.''