With the economy in a tailspin, aircraft "boneyards" across the country are filling up with Boeing 747s and other jetliners no longer needed to ferry passengers. Call it airline limbo.
Air carriers are grounding planes at a rate not seen since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and industry experts say this year is likely to set a record for planes sitting on the ground.
That has meant job security for Richard Robertson, an aircraft mechanic at the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, formerly George Air Force Base, now one of the nation's busiest boneyards.
Robertson has perfected the art of "pickling" airplanes, aviation jargon for disassembling parts and draining fluids from aircraft so they can be stored for a long time.
"It's unfortunate, but when the economy is bad we're doing good," Robertson said as he pulled a cockpit instrument off a Boeing 727 last week so it could be stored for use another time or perhaps on another plane.
The jet, with its windows covered in aluminum foil and engines removed, will be towed later to a sprawling lot that resembles a used-car dealership. It is filled with rows of planes that just months earlier had crisscrossed the Pacific or hopped across the Midwest.
High fuel costs last summer drove many airlines to ground older, gas-guzzling planes.
Since then, a recession- induced travel slump has led carriers to take even more planes out of the sky.
Passenger traffic for the nation's largest carriers dropped an average of 11% in February compared with a year earlier . It marked the carriers' 18th consecutive monthly decline.
Several big airlines that already had pared their schedules over the last six months said last week that they would slash even more flights than planned because demand was falling further.
The latest rush of airliners to Victorville began in October. Before long 100 aircraft were on the tarmac, then 150, and by last week the roster had swelled to nearly 200, making the outpost more crowded at times than Los Angeles International Airport.
Victorville, about 80 miles northeast of Los Angeles, is home to one of three major commercial boneyards in the U.S.
The others are in Arizona and New Mexico, where grounded planes are also piling up. (Mothballed military aircraft such as fighters, bombers and cargo planes end up at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona.)
