Jet cemetery

Mothballed passenger planes await the cutting tools of professional dismantlers at Kemble Airfield, home to Air Salvage International. Photo /Supplied

With its internal wiring hanging from the open cargo doors like the entrails of a gutted whale, passenger jet VT-EYF - the one-time pride of the Air India fleet - was yesterday just the latest multimillion-dollar flying machine to come to Kemble Airfield to die.

In front of the 18-year-old Airbus, which would have cost its owners £30 million ($67 million) new, stood the sorry remains of an identical plane operated until recently by Spanish airline Click. Propped up incongruously on a pile of railway sleepers, it was already shorn of the engines, on-board computers and avionics that together will fetch about £400,000 - a fraction of their original price.

Welcome to the unlikely epicentre of one of the few booming sectors of the global aviation industry - the dismantling, recycling and crushing of aircraft that are no longer needed by airlines who find themselves with older jets that cannot be filled or sold.

The result is that an anonymous former military airbase in Gloucestershire has become the world's most prolific aircraft boneyard, with dozens of planes making one final, smoky flight across the globe to a fatal meeting with the cutting tools of professional dismantlers.

Kemble Airfield, a sprawling expanse of hangars and asphalt near Cirencester, which was Britain's busiest RAF base during World War II, is the operating base of Air Salvage International (ASI), a British company which has eviscerated more than 350 jets in its short history and, in the teeth of the credit crunch, seen its scrapping business double. The phenomenon is part of a global shift in the aviation industry which will see 12,500 passenger planes around the world reach the end of their useful life over the next 20 years. That's 400-plus aircraft a year to be stripped and compacted.

The steady stream of Boeings and Airbuses to Kemble Airfield is the price that the aviation industry is paying for the years during the credit boom when airlines such as easyJet and Ryanair, and bank-backed leasing companies, placed huge orders with manufacturers.

The recession claimed dozens of carriers and inflicted heavy damage on the finances of many others. As the price of new aircraft dipped and passengers stayed at home, airlines have mothballed more than 3000 jets and turboprops, including ageing short-haul workhorses such as MD80s, Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s. Almost all are destined for the scrapyard.

Owen Geach, commercial director of the International Bureau of Aviation, an industry consultancy, said: "There is a range of aircraft which are increasingly expensive to operate and, in the current economic circumstances, their owners are reaching the conclusion that more money can be made from parting them out rather than keeping them in the air.

"There is now a healthy underbelly of activity in the industry that is the recycling and dismantling sector. Not so long ago, these were companies that just took a chainsaw to an airframe. Nowadays it is a more sophisticated industry."

With the aviation industry's environmental image battered by its contribution to greenhouse gases, it has spotted an opportunity to be eco-friendly when it comes to ending the life of a passenger jet. Boeing and Airbus have signed up to guidelines which ensure that at least 70 per cent of every plane they have produced is recycled, rising to more than 95 per cent as technology improves.

But it is left to the likes of ASI to get down and dirty with the unwanted jets by recovering all usable components for sale on the market in certified second-hand aircraft parts, now worth £1.2 billion a year.

Mark Gregory, ASI's managing director, said: "Breaking up an aircraft is a last resort. These are multimillion-pound machines which their owners would rather not see disappear off their balance sheet if they can possibly help it. If you send an aircraft for dismantling, you are looking at a 90 per cent loss on its listed value.

"But we have reached a point where there are simply more of these aircraft out there than the global market can sustain and they are worth more broken up ... We have never been busier - at times we've had four or five aircraft arriving each week."

Engineers at Kemble Airfield spend between two months and 12 weeks carefully deconstructing each jet, testing all its systems before draining its fuel and hydraulic fluid, and removing and labelling each re-usable part, from the rudder to the fire extinguishers in the wings.

The company has even built up a thriving trade in reclinable first and business-class seats, complete with their television screens and reading lights, which are snapped up by aircraft enthusiasts for about £300 each. They would have cost about £5000 in a new aircraft.

Pointing towards passenger jet VT-EYF, which had been denuded of its nose cone and was awaiting the removal of its engines, Gregory said: "It's actually quite sad. Some of these planes are beautiful machines in very good condition. They have been looked after to the last degree. And then they come here."

- INDEPENDENT