Hubs and boneyards

As a rule, airline economics dictate that planes should be used as much as possible. For larger planes used for long-haul flights, this means keeping them flying as close to 24/7 as possible. If you’re an airline flying a big 400-seater Boeing 777, for example, you’ll ideally have it at your home airport for only as long as it takes to get passengers and cargo off and on, refuel, clean, load catering and depart.

The upshot of that is that there simply isn’t enough space at most global hub airports — the ones where major international airlines connect their regional and intercontinental passengers, like Dubai, New York JFK, London Heathrow and so on — to park all the planes that are notionally based there. Those planes aren’t normally all there at the same time. As a result, aircraft are being parked in a variety of places.

“Some airlines are using dedicated storage facilities,” Petchenik explains. Southwest and Delta Air Lines, he says, are storing over 50 aircraft each at Victorville, a former US air base in California that now serves as a logistics hub for business, military and freight aviation, and also a ‘desert boneyard’ famous for its lines and lines of mothballed aircraft.

Delta also has over 80 aircraft stored in each of Marana, Arizona, another boneyard, and Birmingham, Alabama, both in the US, Petchenik says. “United Airlines and American Airlines are each storing aircraft at their hub airports, with over 40 United aircraft stored in Houston (IAH, the city’s main airport). American, in addition to its hub storage, has aircraft parked in Tulsa and Pittsburgh [in the US states of Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, respectively].”

Larger airlines are clustering similar aircraft together; some need certain maintenance, and having engineers who specialise in those types of planes in the same place makes sense. American Airlines, for example, is using four airports: its Airbus A320, A321 and A330 aircraft, as well as Embraer E-190 regional jets, are parked in Pittsburgh, the airport that used to be a hub for US Airways (which merged with American in 2015) but which has had extra space to offer since.