Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville has always been known as an aircraft graveyard. In more recent years, it has also become known for hosting newer aircraft that aren’t flying. First, it was the Southwest fleet of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. Since then, much larger beasts have landed at the airport.
Around the world, vast potions of the global airline fleet remain grounded due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While airlines have been grounding aircraft that they already own, delays in deliveries have also resulted in a need to store brand new aircraft.
Brand new aircraft parked
Southern California Logistics Airport is the perfect place to store aircraft with 930 hectares and two long runways. The airfield is home to ComAv Technical Services who operate around 97 hectares of the airport. According to the company, it has enough room to store over 500 aircraft on hard surface areas.
As mentioned, many new or relatively new aircraft are in storage at the airport. This started with Southwest Airline’s 737 MAX aircraft fleet after the type was grounded in March 2019.
The airfield is also home to many undelivered or delivered on paper aircraft. For example, while being painted in Norwegian colors and given a relevant registration number, SE-RTO is listed as not taken up by the airline on Planespotters.net.
Australian carrier Qantas has sent many aircraft to the facility, including most of its Airbus A380 fleet and some of its Boeing 787s.
Qantas’ 787s aren’t alone, though. You can see that several Qatar Airways 787-9s are at the facility at the top of the article. 787s from Norweigan, Juneyao join them, and some Qatar aircraft yet to receive their full livery.
There’s even a future Vistara 787-8. So far, Vistara has taken two of the 787-8, making it the variant’s only operator in India.
Not only new planes
Of course, it’s not only new aircraft that have ended up at Southern California Logistics Airport. For many aircraft, the flight to Victorville will be their last. This is demonstrated by the vast number of FedEx cargo planes on the ground, some with various stages of spare parts salvaged, such as rudders and nose cones.
Also resting its wings at the airport is Rolls-Royce’s Boeing 747-200 engine testbed. Registered as N787RR, the engine manufacturer uses the aircraft to test new engines in the sky. With the aircraft’s remaining well-established engines, there is little worry if the new engine being tested should fail. In the future, the company will begin using a former Qantas 747-400 for such tests.
Have you visited the aircraft graveyard at Victorville? What did you think? Let us know in the comments!
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