Air India's VT-EYF too ends up in Jet cemetery

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-pound flying machine to come to Kemble Airfield to die.
In front of the 18-year-old Airbus, which would have cost its owners £30m new, stood the sorry remains of an identical plane, an A320 operated until this summer 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.
Against a backdrop of the Cotswold hills, three giant Boeing 747s which had until recently been plying their trade in southern Africa as freighters, await their turn in the new year to be painstakingly stripped of anything of value, before their gleaming aluminium airframes meet the jaws of an industrial wrecking machine.
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, inefficient 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 passenger planes until recently operating in locations from the Seychelles to the Ukraine 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 the Second World War, 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 in the last 12 months.
From business class seats being snapped up by enthusiasts for their front rooms to sections of airframe used by colleges to train would-be flight attendants, the contents of aircraft that once commanded prices up to $148m (£89m) are now being sold off for a song after being torn apart in Gloucestershire's aviation charnel house.
With the aviation industry's environmental image battered by its contribution to the emissions that cause global warming, it has spotted an opportunity that when it comes to ending the life of a passenger jet, its methods should be eco-friendly. Boeing and Airbus have signed up to guidelines which ensure that at least 70 per cent of every plane they have produced is recycled, with that proportion rising to more than 95 per cent as technology improves.
10/12/09 Cahal Milmo/The Independant, UK

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Categories: Air India Domestic Dec 2009, Foreign Dec 2009, Indian Aviation- In General Dec 2009, NACIL Dec 2009