Victorville aircraft boneyard, the place where hundreds of aviation giants rest

@ElentirENG ES 9·15·2023 · 23:17 0

The United States has some of the largest aircraft cemeteries in the world, located in some desert areas of that country.

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One of those cemeteries is at the Southern California Logistics Airport, also known as Victorville Airport, because it is located in this town in the state of California. From 1941 to 1992 this airport served as a military base, being operated since 1947 by the US Air Force (USAF), under the name of George AFB. Since its conversion into a civil airport, and especially since the airline crisis due to the 2020 pandemic, Victorville Airport has been used as an aircraft graveyard.

This aeronautical cemetery has a capacity of about 500 aircraft, and is currently practically at capacity. Airlines from different countries have contracted space there to storage some airplanes that it is not worth it to keep operational, waiting for better days or even as a supply bank of spare parts for other airplanes still in operation. Among the inhabitants of this cemetery there are a few Airbus A-380, the largest commercial aircraft in history, with capacity for 853 passengers. It is a model that generated great expectations but was first affected by the economic crisis of 2007 and, now definitively, by the 2020 pandemic.

Two years ago, the channel XLRS Aviation published an interesting video showing the planes stored in Victorville at that time:

You can see some screenshots from the video here. Here we can see a small part of the enormous extension of this aircraft cemetery. Initially it occupied the parking platforms, and later ended up occupying a large part of one of the two runways of the old military base, the Runway 03/21, which measures 2.7 km long. Currently, desert areas have been set up in the vicinity of the airport to store more planes.

In this image we see three of the four A-380s of the Australian airline Qantas that are at the northern end of the Victorville cemetery. Near them are planes from the American airline United and the New Zealand airline Air New Zealand. Beyond them are several dozen FedEx McDonnell Douglas DC-10 cargo planes.

In the center of this image we see an old Boeing 747-400 of the German airline Lufthansa. They have erased the airline's logo on the fuselage and also its livery on the drift.

In addition to the planes stored at the airport, at the entrance there is a McDonnell Douglas F-4C Phantom II fighter, 63-7519, a plane that entered service in 1964 in the USAF, being retired in 1986. Since 1989 it was displayed at the entrance to George AFB as a monument. It continues there. The plane was restored in 2016.

If you want to explore this airplane graveyard without leaving home, you can do so on Google Maps here: