At first glance, it could almost be mistaken for a scene from an ordinary busy international airport – until we realise that something darker and more unusual is afoot. Most of the airliners are on crates; their nose cones have been hacked off, their ailerons are missing, their doors have been removed, their engines have been ripped out. This isn’t an airport, it’s a graveyard, a place where planes come to die when they have grown weary of crossing our stratosphere. Many of their old owners, like ageing actors who can longer bear to look in the mirror, specify that the logos on their tailfins be painted out, as if an acknowledgement of decrepitude would violate the always youthful promises of technology. There are representatives from all the continents and the most famous airlines. They have come here from Australia, Germany, Britain and America. Machines that spent their working lives being meticulously cared for by specialist mechanics are, in death, hacked at with chainsaws and diggers. Food-trolley doors, seat belts and upended toilet seats clack in the desert wind, making it sound like a marina in a storm. The oldest planes were new only forty years ago, but high technology dates especially fast; the Parthenon looks younger than they do. Inside the cabins there are outsize Bakelite phones, coils of fat electric cables, bulky boxes on the ceilings where film projectors were once slotted. Some aircraft still sport their Pratt & Whitney JT3D engines, the proud workhorses of the 1970s, which generated a then-remarkable 17,500 pounds of thrust; there was little guessing that a few decades later their successors would, with a fraction of the fuel or noise output, be capable of producing four times as much. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know that time is remorseless and that nothing will endure. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas: all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick’s skull. Inside many of the planes, the emergency oxygen masks have dropped down from their overhead compartments. They have done so not in the gruesome accident that may come to mind (the engines are on fire and the emergency slides have been inflated!), but simply through the slow erosion of their spring catches. Perhaps we are always more likely to die like this, without particular drama, without firemen in smoke hoods and foam on the runway, without the comfort of a collective accident and the sympathy of newscasters: just through an insipidly slow process of disintegration. We have a hard time keeping death in mind. It always seems an unlikely possibility – and the faster we can fly to other continents or magically beam our thoughts around the globe, the less likely it seems. Aeroplane graveyards are where we can travel to witness the death of the future, and, despite all our high-tech gadgets, prepare to greet our own ends with grace.
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