“The area is well known for its feisty ‘rattlers’ who love to curl up around the warm rubber tyres and in the aircraft wheels and brakes,” says Qantas’ manager for engineering in LA Tim Heywood. The team uses a repurposed broom handle, known as a wheel whacker, to wake the snakes up and drive them away. “The first thing we do before we unwrap and start any ground inspections of the landing gear, in particular, is to walk around the aircraft stomping our feet and tapping the wheels with a wheel whacker to wake up and scare off the snakes. That’s about making sure no harm comes to our engineers or the snakes. Only then do we carefully approach each wheel and unwrap them before performing our pressure checks and visual inspections.”

Every aircraft expected to fly again is then checked at least once a week if the plan is for it to be returned to service, something that can be hugely lucrative to boneyard owners and the contractors based out of there.

Boneyards – and the super-secretive processes that go on there – have long since captured imaginations. But COVID has seen them receive unprecedented attention as airlines either sent their ageing aircraft out to pasture – Qantas’ 747s are an hour’s drive away at the Mojave Air and Space Port – or to be held in long-term storage until the pandemic blows over. Deserts make perfect sense for both uses. The dry heat and low humidity mean metallic fuselages take longer to rust and degrade. At the same time, their hard alkaline subsoil stops heavy aircraft from sinking into the ground. Space is cheap and, crucially, away from prying eyes that may not want to see their once flagships ripped apart (I contacted the owners of all the world’s significant boneyards, and none wanted to talk, and I barely found a single interview with any of them conducted by another media outlet). Boneyards are also home to specialist firms that reclaim and tidy up usable parts, ready to sell to more modern aircraft in need of a fix. Desert scavengers, in other words.

There’s always been a need for places like Victorville because aircraft have limited lifespans. The shelf-life of an aircraft largely depends on its number of take-offs and landings, with its fuselage and wings particularly susceptible to fatigue. It means widebody long-haul aircraft, conducting fewer daily trips, tend to last far longer than narrowbodies. Today, airlines and plane makers can use ultrasonic waves to detect cracks as small as one millimetre and decide whether it’s worth repairing or upgrading an aircraft.

Sometimes it’s not even about damage, but business. Superjumbos such as the 747 and A380 are being sent to boneyards because airlines have replaced them with smaller long-haul aircraft with better fuel efficiency, such as Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner and Airbus’ A350, while budget airlines have similarly rushed to embrace the 737 MAX and A320neo. Another revolution is lurking around the corner, too, with the release of the ultra-long-haul 777x and the A350-1000, a bespoke version of which will be used for Qantas’ non-stop Project Sunrise flights between London and Sydney.

The processes that go on in a boneyard depend primarily on the length of the stay. Typically though, the first job will be to place desiccants or drying agents inside the engines to absorb moisture before adding lubricants to the surfaces of the wings and landing gears. For instance, Qantas’ A380s in Victorville are loaded with 100 kilograms of silica to prevent moisture from affecting the cabin fixtures. Next, the aircraft will be washed thoroughly to remove corroding salt before covering the engines, propellers, windows and any ducks or inlets with aluminium tape or white, reflective materials. For more extended stays, aircraft will be painted over with an easily strippable paint, two coats of black followed by a final white layer to deflect the sun. For commercial aircraft, explosive devices will be removed, such as the charges that activate ejection seats, and power sources on all types of planes will be disconnected, electrically disarming the emergency systems.

Every aircraft expected to fly again is then checked at least once a week if the plan is for it to be returned to service, something that can be hugely lucrative to boneyard owners and the contractors based out of there.

“This could include periodical power-ups of various systems, such as the auxiliary power unit, engines, avionic systems and the environmental control systems,” says Dr Sonya Brown, a senior lecturer in aerospace design at UNSW. “There’s also a periodic sampling of the fuel for any contamination and maintenance checks of surfaces to check for signs of things like corrosion or what we call foreign object damage.”

These checks are vital given the additional safety concerns of aircraft being in the sky rather than vehicles simply returning to the road. “If something happens to the battery in your car, you can pull over, and you’re not going to injure lots of people,” says Dr Brown. “But if something goes wrong with your batteries and you’re 30,000 feet in the air, it could be a lot more catastrophic.”

Qantas’ Heywood agrees: “Aircraft like these are highly technical, and you can’t just land it at the storage facility, park it and walk away. It’s really important that even when in deep storage, the aircraft are maintained to the Qantas standard.”

During the pandemic, eyebrows have been raised at the long-term ramifications of having so many aircraft in the desert. Despite the ongoing turnover of aircraft, there has never been a period in history where so many have been stored. Are passengers right to be worried? Dr Brown thinks the fears have been overstated. “The procedures are normal enough that every aircraft maintenance manual has a chapter in it detailing exactly how to store the aircraft for different lengths of time,” she says. “It’s normal practice. It’s just typically, we don’t have so many aircraft there at the same time. That’s the abnormal thing.”

Any problems, she adds, are more likely to come from the procedures not being followed due to the unprecedented demand on engineers rather than the procedures themselves. “The problem is – or the problem becomes – if you want to do too much in too short a period, then things might start getting skipped. Suppose you don’t have enough qualified staff. In that case, tasks might get completed by people who aren’t experienced enough to notice an issue. Things could get missed.”

The other issue for returning aircraft is pilots being out of practice after years of being stood down. “Even though airlines will be putting their flight crew through extra simulator hours before getting back in the air, it’s still not as much as they get when they’re flying several days a week normally,” says Dr Brown. “The airlines are doing the best they can, but they don’t have as many simulators as they have actual aircraft.”

It’s tempting to think of boneyards as purely a COVID phenomenon, but their attendance numbers have tended to spike and decline in cycles as the industry perennially finds itself on the pointy end of world crises. They first rose to prominence in the years following the end of World War II. The US alone had manufactured nearly 300,000 military aircraft, and the country was left with a surplus of almost 120,000 that were either sold, scrapped or held in storage after being stripped of confidential information. Another wave of planes arrived at the boneyards in the late 1960s and 1970s as propellor turboprops were replaced with jet engine passenger aircraft. And on and on it goes: the 1973 oil crisis saw planes grounded before prices stabilised; deregulation led to fewer planes working more hours; then there was the Gulf War in 1991; 9/11 a decade later; the groundings of the MAX before finally, COVID. No wonder Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce says the aviation industry faces a crisis at seven-year intervals.

But as each mini-disaster fades, stoic aircraft soldier back into service. How long does it take, I ask Dr Brown, to ‘thaw out’ a major airliner after their slumber in the sun? “If you only cared about bringing one aircraft out of long-term storage, and you had the appropriate staffing numbers, you could probably achieve that in a couple of weeks. But in this situation, we don’t have that. Qantas, for example, is saying it’s starting to look at what’s happening in December, and it’s a good thing that they’re forward planning. Because if you’re talking about bringing back large numbers, you need a few months, at least. We’re not talking about bringing one aircraft back with an intensive team focused on that aircraft to get it back into service. We’re talking about a large number of aircraft with qualified maintenance staff working across aircraft. You can’t do it in two weeks.”

And as this issue was being put to bed, we got more good news about when those 10 Qantas A380s might leave, with the airline saying it will use five to fly between Sydney and LA from July 2022, and between Sydney and London, via Singapore, from November 2022. That’s six months ahead of schedule, with the fleet originally not thought to return at all until the following year. In total, Qantas expects 10 of its 12 A380s to be back to performing regularly scheduled services by early 2024, while the remaining two are to be retired.

And their return to the skies will be coming sooner still. In May, the first of Qantas’ fleet, VH-OQC, departed Victorville for LAX to undergo a gear swing procedure before becoming one of 10 to upgrade its cabins. Qantas’ team watched it thunder down the desert runway with pride. “It was terrific to see the A380 in full flight once again,” says Heywood. “We are proud to keep them in top-notch condition until the time comes for them to fly again. We can hang up our wheel whackers at that point.”

The world’s biggest boneyards

Mojave

Mojave Air and Space Port is located in the California desert, about 150 kilometres north of LA. First opened in 1935 as a rural airfield serving local gold miners, it’s grown into one of the world’s most notable boneyards. In total over the last decade, Qantas has sent nine 747-400s there. The airport is also home to Virgin’s new satellite venture, Virgin Orbit, overseen by Richard Branson.

Victorville

Victorville – technically known as the Southern California Logistics Airport – is located 145 kilometres north-east of LA, on the southwestern edge of the Mojave Desert. It’s thought to have a capacity of 500 aircraft. The site was the old home of George Air Force Base from 1941 to 1992 before being converted into arguably the world’s most famous boneyard. In the last decade, Qantas has sent eight of its 747s to Victorville.

Alice Springs

Asia Pacific Aircraft Storage (APAS), as seen on our cover, both stores and disposes aircraft and has seen its capacity soar during the pandemic, from holding 18 aircraft pre-COVID to 150 during the last financial year. More than 110 employees were employed by APAS to maintain aircraft, which have included Singapore Airline’s A380 fleet. The facility was given a series of government investments to fund its growth, including a $3.5 million injection from the Territory government in July last year. Tom Vincent, who owns APAS, previously told the ABC that parking spaces were “definitely in demand”. “As soon as extra spots for storage come online, there are aircraft filling those spots,” Vincent said.

Davis-Monthan Air Force Base

The world’s biggest boneyard is home to more than 4,000 military aircraft spread across 10.5 square kilometres in Arizona. It’s been known to be the final resting place for aircraft such as B-52 bombers, B-29 Superfortresses, C-47 Skytrains and 727-100s.

Pinal Airpark

The Pinal County Airpark is located in Marana, Arizona, north-west of Tucson. Qantas sent one aircraft here, VH-OJG, back in 2012. The facility is open to the public, but only in one designated area.

Moses Lake

The five-runway Moses Lake Grant County International Airport boasts one of the largest airfields in the US, and is utilised for both military and commercial test flights. Qantas sent one of its 747s here, VH-OJU, in 2019.

Roswell

The desert Roswell boneyard, technically known as the Roswell International Air Center, is infamous for an apparent UFO crash on 4 July 1947. Air New Zealand has sent its 777-200s to the facility, which is thought to have a huge 500 aircraft capacity.