Stored B737 MAX & Jumbos: visiting an industrial airport
The dense fog is a feature of this region. It enveloped us inexorably as we drove through the plains of Western Catalonia, to the point that the whole object of our visit was, at some point, in doubt.
How are we going to see the planes if we can’t even see the airport?
Luckily the fog started to lift slowly as the elegant lines and signature earthy tones of Lleida-Alguaire control tower came into sight!
We had left Barcelona a couple of hours earlier in the morning with the intention of visiting a rather unique aeronautical spot, one of the handful of airports in Europe (and the world, for that matter) that specialize in the business of storing, maintaining and, if need be, breaking up and recycling commercial aircraft.
In Europe, the Cotswolds airport, in England, Tarbes, in South-West France, and Teruel, Spain, (which was the object of this piece I wrote for CNN) are major industrial airports. Alguaire airport, near the city of Lleida, is the latest member of this exclusive club.
In fact, Lleida-Alguaire airport (ILD) was not built with this purpose in mind.
Planned at a time when money was easily available and every town aspired to have its own air gateway, Alguaire airport, which was finally inaugurated in 2010, was expected to service both the city of Lleida, Catalonia’s main agribusiness hub, and the ski resorts in the Pyrenees, some 100 miles north.
Optimistic traffic previsions never materialized though. In 2019 just under g0,000 passengers passed through the airport. The only regular route, to Palma de Mallorca (PMI), is operated twice weekly by Iberia’s regional franchise Air Nostrum. A handful of charter flights also use the airport during the Winter season.
Considered a white elephant for most of the last decade (see this series of posts about Spain’s empty airports), Lleida-Alguaire seems to have found its true vocation, though: it has reinvented itself as an industrial airport and with remarkable success in this field, so far
In addition to hosting a pilot training school, whose light aircraft account for most of the airport’s operations, MRO firm Servitec has also set up shop in the premises.
Airlines have started to send their surplus aircraft to Lleida-Alguaire for storage, maintenance and, in some cases, to dispose of them.
We had a rare opportunity to visit in February and see from up close how aircraft are stored, maintained and recycled.
Although now dwarfed by the effects of the Covid-19 epidemic on the global travel industry, at the time of our visit, if there was a major issue massively impacting the plans of quite a few airlines, that was the grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft.
In fact, the misfortune of this particular aircraft type has, unexpectedly proved to be a boon for this airport.
Two Nordic operators of the type: Icelandair and Norwegian have sent part of their MAX fleets to Alguaire for storage, making of this Catalan airfield the the largest MAX storage site in Europe.
Each of these aircraft follows a specific maintenance programme while in storage, mostly to make sure that their engines continue in perfect working order.
You can learn more details about this process on this piece I wrote for CNN.
Truth be told: the red of the Norwegian planes, the blue and yellow of the Icelandic ones and the fresh green of the surrounding fields made for quite a nice colour combination!
At the time of our visit, members of staff were moving around some of the Icelandair Boeing 737 MAXes, in order to optimize the available space, certainly in expectation of some new, non-disclosed arrivals.
The chance to see all these Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in one place already justified the trip, but that was not all…Right by the apron where the MAXes are kept and maintained there was another treat: two Boeing 747s. waiting for us.
One of them, a freighter, was in temporary storage (it has since been reactivated to support logistic operations in support of the fight against Covid-19). We will speak about this particular aircraft in a separate photo-post.
The other, a Boeing 747-400 still in the livery of its last operator, Spanish charter airline Wamos, was being dismantled piecemeal.
Although it is sad to see such a mighty aircraft being broken down, it was also a rather interesting sight.
The airframe was pretty much intact, but the engines were in the process of being taken away from their fittings. The nacelles were already gone and deposited on the ground, near the aircraft, while the engine mechanism, we were told, is usually dismantled whole. This is the most valuable part.
Next to the Wamos Boeing 747, another wide-body aircraft was being recycled, but this one was in an even more advanced state of dismantlement. This former TAP Air Portugal Airbus A330 had already been stripped of any valuable parts and was just waiting to be cut for scrap.
So thorough had been the part-stripping that there was no longer a landing gear to sustain it, it was held, instead by some ad-hoc wooden supports.
Here some overhead baggage bins, ripped off the cabin of the A330.
Last but not least, visit to the control tower, the highest point in many miles around!
With the fog gone for the day, the view from here was simply magnificent.
Note how the aircraft are packed tightly together to make the most out of the available space (only one Norwegian Boeing 737 MAX appears in the frame, though, the rest were parked to the left of this picture).
The aim of this post was to mainly to be a photo document of how an industrial airport is like, but, as mentioned earlier, you can find a whole account of our visit to Lleida-Alguaire airport, including some expert comment about aircraft storage and recycling from MRO professionals, on this CNN piece.