She is parked in at the corner of a scrap yard next to a heap of spent tyres.  Even with no nose and 4 holes where her engines should have been I know what she is. Her modest paintwork, distinctive 2 storey front section and wide body told me that even with my untrained eye, I was standing next to The Queen of the Skies.

I’m looking at the last British Airways Boeing 747. In a couple of months she will be snipped up into pieces the size of an estate car and be melted down to start a new life as something else. It will take less than 3 days to break her apart. Then she will be gone with no trace; her engines busy flying again, avionics pulled out, recertified and reused and ashtrays sold on eBay. If you want to buy her shell it’s a mere $80k which feels a steal given she and other aircraft of her type have flown 4billion passengers around the planet over the past 50 years.

I have driven the A433 to Cirencester a few times, a fast windy-ish road, and each time I nearly drove the car into the hedge because I was looking over fields at partly obscured airplane tail tips. As far as I knew it was a grave yard of airplanes waiting stoically after a life of hard labour to be unceremoniously turned into teaspoons. I like planes, and I like tea. So, I got in touch with Mark Gregory CEO of Air Salvage International to ask if I could have a look around and a chat about what he gets up to with all these planes destined to become cutlery.

I turn off the road and rather self-consciously drive into the airfield through a gate and up to a hangar where it all seemed rather empty and quiet. It smells of oil and aviation fuel. It reminds me of organising the farm workshop as a kid, and also of that warming hit of a kerosene smell when you walk up the air stairs to hop on a plane for a holiday.

I find myself walking up to yet another vast green metal structure. To the side stands an unfriendly looking galvanised fence marking the edge of the airfield.  I knock on the door of Hangar 1.

Mark Gregory opens the door, he is tanned with hair back in a low ponytail tied Lagerfeld style with a black ribbon, wearing Gucci loafers, an impeccable white shirt, blazer and a gentlemanly placed pink handkerchief. My first thought? Damnit, I knew I should have worn the Hermes and the monochrome. He is very cool indeed, in a sort of St Tropez bringing greasy airplanes kind of way.

We sit down at a board room table with a bowl of toffee pennies between us. On the wall are hanging a captain’s uniform and some hi viz ready to be thrown on for any aviation emergency, or photo opportunity. In a corner of the room is a bed for his spaniel, who loves nothing better to stroll around the airfield at sunrise with his master before anyone else arrives.

I’m fascinated before we even start talking about aviation.

Air Salvage International have been in business for 27 years and at Kemble for 23 years. Being an old MOD base it had “a runway long enough for a Boeing 747 and a control tower.” That was all he needed. Virgin Atlantic dropped off their first jumbo to be disassembled here in 2000, with the agreement that the decals were removed as airlines don’t like to show off the fact that they are breaking their machines up. Why? “Passenger fear, people don’t like thinking their plane is made out of used bits. But what they don’t understand is the process they go through before they go on the aircraft.”

Cotswolds Airport is a busy place. The more we talk the more businesses it seems Mark runs.  There is Air Salvage International which recovers and breaks planes for parts, Southern Airframe an off-site parts repair shop, Skyline Aero run by his son Bradley which sells  airplane parts and GCAM a company that maintains and stores aircraft on behalf of banks and lessors. 70% of passenger planes are leased.

I ask what his favourite part of the business is. He looks at me, baffled “all of it. I love coming in to work every morning.” I wonder why. With a Cotswolds home that has garages enough to park his many classic cars (E-types, MGs and a Jenson Interceptor) a hefty Range Rover out front the hangar as well as the epic fashion choices, I’d wager he doesn’t need to work. He kicks back in his chair and looks out of the window at a few Piper Cherokees parked up. (He has one of those too for larking about in, but it’s stored in a different hangar.) “I am very privileged to do what I do. I get to walk around these magnificent machines all day. Speak to anyone in Aviation and they’ll tell you it’s a spectacular industry to work in.” He puts his hands down on the table, draws closer “it is an addiction.”

His dad was a builder and mum worked in Bristol in the tobacco industry, heading up their travel department. Mark always loved planes, joining the industry as a mechanical engineer with Dan Air. He left Dan Air then started working on light aircraft which didn’t quite pay the bills.

This is where dealing in airplane parts began. “Someone I met had a company that wanted an aircraft spare parts, I knew of an aircraft and bought it. I then started breaking Avro 748s for spares and really enjoyed it…. A friend of mine friend who worked for Pratt and Whitney told me they just purchased a few aircraft purely for the engines. They asked if I’d go down to Exeter and take some engines off an aircraft and get rid of the airframe for them.” Whilst at Exeter Mark met Phillip Meeson (now multi-millionaire owner of Jet 2) at the time Philip was running an airline called Channel Express that operated Dart Heralds, Philip had an aging aircraft to dispose parked at Exeter of so Mark obliged and carried this out.

Business at this time was running from Mark’s garden shed. What is clear is that even from the start he knew people, he knew planes and he knew how to do business. From there he broke up 12 aircraft in Bournemouth and ended up with a deal with Virgin Atlantic. The rest …as they say is … ‘an awful LOT of business going on at Cotswold airport.’ Not one piece of airplane from this place ends up in landfill*.

There are the 4 main businesses I mentioned above. But there are more. Cotswold Aero is a flying club and light aircraft maintenance facility. They lease aircraft to other flying clubs with any profits being ploughed back into the company. He has his Cherokee, but nonchalantly drops in that he has his own Boeing 727 (with another parked up near the breaking yard for spares) which he taxis about the airport in. This plane has some impressive provenance. Owned originally by the Kuwaiti Royal family it was seized by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces during their invasion of Kuwait in the 1990s. It was then absorbed into Iraqi airways and only returned to the Kuwaiti royal family after the end of the war.  The plane made a political statement being painted by the Kuwaitis with “don’t forget our prisoners of war.”

Mark acquired the plane in 2016 and does a weekly run up of the engines. It’s not airworthy but has been used in TV shows; most recently Hijack with Idris Elba and in a detective show; Mcdonald and Dobbs. Star Wars, Mission Impossible and Dr Who have all had scenes shot inside ASI’s Aircraft, and more often than not it’s Mark piloting the airplane. “You’ll see my arm in loads of things!”

Thorpe Park’s Disaster themed 4.5G wing rollercoaster The Swarm has a fractured airplane provided by ASI. They have specialist trucks that transport outsize cargo to various places in the UK. “We managed to find a way to get Concorde up to Scotland.”

Aside from the glamour of the film industry, whose scouts and locations people have Mark on speed dial, this plane library in the heart of the Cotswolds has a more sobering role. Sections of aircraft fuselage are used to train emergency service workers in how to manage a plane crash, extinguish post impact fires and to map and recover important remnants of an accident. Though heavily tied with NDAs Mark was able to tell me that he works with Porton Down and the SAS, training them in storming aircraft.

The flying days of an aircraft is only a part of its lifespan. Most of the aircraft that are broken up here are mid to late life. They may not be old in years; there is a 9 year old EasyJet plane here ready to be dismantled for parts. It is high cycled (multiple take-off and landings), which means its airframe is fatigued beyond its years. It needs a major overhaul. This is expensive, so the plane is worth more in its component parts than it is as a whole. “We can easily have a $10million aircraft, that in bits is worth $12Million.”

We walk into the maintenance hangar and he points to two enormous engines, preserved and wrapped in white clingfilm on steel support stands.

. “Each of those is worth $3.5 million.” 80% of an airplane’s value is in its engines. I ask if the hangar is secure enough given the high values of these aircraft bits, catalogued and stored on shelves all around the walls.  It is secure as it can be and is within the confines of the airport perimeter. “But, even if you stole something, you couldn’t sell it. Everything has to have traceability as there is trade in unsafe counterfeit parts.” I turn over the flap actuator I’m holding, see the number, and replace it on the bench. It probably wouldn’t have fit in my bag anyway. I peer inside the hold space of the plane. It is stuffed full of breeze blocks? He explains “When we remove the engines the centre of gravity changes so we have to weigh it down to prevent it tipping nose up” and smashing the aft fuselage.

Once the high value engines and the avionics have been stripped from the plane, what is left is classed as scrap. There is a large amount of aluminium from the airframe but also small pieces of palladium, platinum, silver and gold from the non-reusable electronic connectors. “These are then put in containers and sent to The Royal Mint for recycling and metal reclamation.  We need to see if it is worth it financially to do this.” It’s neat; a piece of beloved flying machine reworked to become the bullion on which our currency is based. “Though there is no point in doing it if its not economically viable.” Mark is romantic about these aircraft, but not sentimental.

We walk out of the hangar to see a plane being inspected following a lease return. Engineers use borescopes to reach the deep recesses of the turbofan engines.  We stop, standing on the tines of a forklift. One of the ASI staff approaches us, laughing. “Did you hear, we might be needed for a recovery later?” They both look over to a very unhappy looking aircraft with 8 propellers and a wing sticking down at right angles to the floor. Even I know that doesn’t look quite right. I was sworn to secrecy at the time, but the news is out now; Vertical Aerospace, who are developing a battery powered air taxi, managed to drop their (thankfully unmanned) aircraft from a height that morning. They called it “a heavy unscheduled landing.”

Mark shakes his head, he is “not an advocate for battery powered transport in any form, really.” His view is that the amount of diesel and carbon required to mine battery components is so excessive that people are being ‘greenwashed’ into buying electric cars. After the Vertical Aerospace plane crashed that morning, there were concerns over the radios about thermal runaway in their batteries. This is when Lithium ion cells enter an uncontrollable self-heating state, resulting in shrapnel containing explosions and fire. “Imagine that in a multi car pile-up. Combustion engines are becoming more and more efficient, we need to improve on what we have got rather than chasing the more carbon intense electric power. It’s just not going to work.” He is sticking with the Range Rover.

We hop into his (diesel) Jag and drive across the airfield to the breaking yard. His phone rings. I must admit I felt pretty cool; sunglasses on, speeding down a taxiway and chatting to air traffic control. It’s the MOD calling, quizzing him on how to recycle the carbon composite from Typhoon fighter aircraft. “We are looking into how, but right now it’s not possible.” He puts the MOD off for 10 minutes whilst we head to the final stage of their dismantling process.

Does he ever find anything in the seat pockets? “Oh yes, loads of pens and wallets full of cash; most of them get repatriated. We once broke a Columbian plane for parts. I joke that this is how I can afford all my classic cars: we found a stash of cocaine hidden in that aircraft worth more than the value of the plane itself!”

We park up walk past a plane used to train the fire service.

Do you recycle the metal from crashed planes where people have died? “No, not usually. The planes are normally destroyed.” There are members of his team who are on call for major air incidents, their expertise in breaking aircraft means that they are also experts in identifying aircraft remains. They were part of the investigation of the Afriqiyah Airways crash in Tripoli, Libya in 2010 which killed 104 people. The went in after the army and medics have removed the bodies and personal effects. “Our job was to grid the area and support the local military to unpick and name parts of what was left of the aircraft.”

He changes the subject. “I get 10 calls a week asking for aircraft fuselage for home offices and glamping pods. They are less keen when I tell them it’s going to be £50K, it takes a lot of work to cut the sections off and move it. They then tend to then go to B&Q and pick up a garden shed for 5K!” he laughs “everyone thinks that they came up with a really original idea.” Everything in the yard, despite the paintwork telling a story of a glamorous past life in the world of travel, is now only worth its weight as scrap. Oh, another business he has is planestation.aero; an aircraft souvenirs website. You can buy redundant pilot’s seat for up to £6k, or small sections of fuselage with a window for £150. The money raised here is spent on the staff Christmas party.

We stand quietly in the breaking area, just in the shadow of the last British Airways Boeing 747. Metal recycler Smiths of Gloucestershire are coming at the end of the week to chop up and crush up the airframes of 5 aircraft that are in the yard. The recycled aluminium will never be used again in aviation.  But it’s not the enormous 747’s turn yet. I laugh as his reason why; “it’s not really taking up any space, it can stay here with us a little longer.” For someone who acts so very unsentimental, I think he allows himself an exception for this particular bird.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some interesting articles:

The Spoils of War (and What the War Spoiled) (key.aero)

How Boeing’s 747 became the ‘Queen of the Skies’ – BBC News

Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771 – Wikipedia

**Vertical Aerospace’s air taxi prototype appears to crash during test in U.K without injuries – Aerospace America (aiaa.org)

*If the parts NOT used back in the supply chain to keep aging aircraft operational, or repurposed/upcycled the metals such as aluminium, steel and ferrous, titanium, copper and precious metals are recycled. Unwanted or unrecyclable material will be incinerated for power generation and the ash from incineration is used in road fill or tarmac. Even the fuels and oils are recycled.