How many people does it take to chop up a Boeing 747? Roughly One….And his name is Andy. More on him later.

October 2023 Cotswold Airport Gloucestershire (Kemble)

As promised, I’m back at Kemble with Air Salvage International (ASI) to watch the final scrapping of the airplanes. Have a read of Part 1 to find out what happens to the planes when they first arrive at Kemble. The metal birds are fully relieved of their valuable parts e.g. the engines, avionics, connectors and are now simply large, plane shaped tubes of scrap aluminium moving down the inexorable path to their new lives as a window frame, or a can of Stella Artois.

If you can’t wait to see the big chop up – there is a link to the video here!

After a drive across the airfield (I got to drive this time, escorted by a Ford Fiesta with an orange light on its roof). Of course, I was playing the Top Gun theme tune in my head and only had half a hand on the steering wheel. 

Arriving at the yard at the end of the runway, I am met by Neil Robbins, the Business Development Manager for the Waste Division at Smiths (Gloucester) Limited. He is a self-confessed “waste nerd” and has worked in the waste industry for over 16 years.

Getting the planes taken down and finally out of Kemble is his responsibility. Neil’s passion for waste is infectious; even before we start talking aircraft he has a told me about the magic of recycling and how, if we are careful, we can find alternatives to landfill for the majority of materials. He’s brimming with knowledge and enthusiasm for bio-digesters, the waste hierarchy, metal and plastic recycling and so much more. “My family still think I am a bin man” he laughs as he tells me about finding buyers for vast amounts of valuable scrap metal.

 

 

We walk into the aircraft dismantling yard together. The first thing to pop into my head when I see the mountain of torn up aluminium, steel, chairs, wood and insulation. It looks like my smallest daughter’s bedroom, only here I can still see some floor! The heap of broken up planes, which is about the size of 10 Arctic lorries parked up together, will be packed into Smith’s bulkers and taken as is to a metal buyer and processor in Nottingham. “We never want to run any of our fleet empty so with some strategic planning, we will always find suitable backloads. An empty truck runs at a cost to the company, but also to the environment after all”  

Simon, ASI’s operations manager, turns up looking very happy. “You’re cracking through it aren’t you?” He points to the BA 747 still in the yard, her wings have now been clipped off and thrown in the pile to make workspace for the heavy plant. “That’s been here 3 years, I can’t wait to see it smashed to bits!” In 2 days, Smiths have chopped up 3 planes and I was disappointed to hear that most of the work has been done and was wondering quite how I was going to describe a teardown I hadn’t actually seen.

How do you chop up an airliner?

Their main dismantling machine is Andy’s Doosan crawler with a rotating crusher. He makes light work of pulverising aviation aluminium, separating different materials for recycling and slicing happily through reinforced steel rods. The Doosan has a high reach boom and serves a late Cretaceous look with its Tyrannosaurus mouth parts. Its teeth are made of wear resistant grade ’HB’ steel and has a tooth tip crushing force of more than 50 tons. Chomp.

Its huge orange arm swoops down towards the ground at speed with its jaws held a little open enough to pluck tiny sections of wood from the floor and drop it delicately on the dross heap. Neil rolls his eyes “He’s just showing off now!”

So, with the yard devoid of planes to crush, Andy boulders down the outside of his machine and comes over for a chat. I have to admit I fawned a bit, I was well impressed by the intricate nature of his work and the delicacy of his excavator skills. I ask him what his favourite bit to chop up is. “Well, none of it. It’s just a job, I’ve been doing 5 years. Get in, crush it, get out!” He laughed “I know this job like the back of my hand… it does make you question hopping on a plane though, knowing how easy it is to chop one up… no bother I’m off to Lanzarote next week.” I say I’m off there in a fortnight. He shrugs and tells me there will be no beer left by the time I get there.

He carries on talking to Neil, deadpan “we’ve done well, haven’t we mate? Not to have any fires this time!”

Fires??

They both look over at me, casually. “It’s been known to happen!” Though the planes are drained of all their caustic elements, oils, hydraulic fluid and fuel, there is always something flammable left lazing about half evaporated in the tanks. Andy tells me the wings, reinforced with titanium ribs that “spark as soon as you touch them,” often ignite during a teardown. I assumed gallons of water, foam and sirens would ensue, but no. Andy coolly goes in with his nipper, chops of the offending burning part, and pops it in the corner of the yard to burn itself out. Apparently, it’s “No biggie.”

This seemingly casual approach to danger shows how skilled these people are. Neil explains “Waste is one of the most dangerous industries to work in, and aircraft breaking has obvious hazards.” Whilst I am staggering about in my Hi-Viz taking photos and asking questions they are constantly on the lookout for imminent danger. He continues “We always have our heads on a swivel, checking for problems; change in operating noise, machines stopping when they shouldn’t be, things not being in the right place etc.”  He is always aware of who is working where and on what.

A small piece of green fuselage and a seat cushion cartwheel across the yard. “Wind is the thing we have to watch out for most here”. Air fields need to be kept immaculate lest a piece of debris gets sucked into an engine.

I ask Neil if there anything he won’t break up? “You’re asking a salesman! I’ll always find a way. If it’s not something we can handle, we will speak to our contacts across the industry to work together to find a solution”

Andy grumbles about the mess in the yard and hops into another machine (a blue Fuchs) with a huge claw to clean up. He drags about a bulbous tangle of what looks like coat hanger wire held between the jaws of the crusher and sweeps the small scraps on the ground onto the pile of dross. It’s a mega scale Brillo pad. Despite Andy’s protestations about it being ‘just a job’ the pride he takes in the work is undeniable.

Neil and I take shelter under the tail of the 747 keeping out of the way of Andy’s housekeeping. “Cool isn’t it?” People assume that the waste industry is full of cowboys, we just work for cash and we chuck everything in landfill. It’s just not the case.” He gestures towards a wooden stillage tucked beside the nose gear. It is packed with redundant life jackets. “We can’t just landfill those. We research the materials it is made from and then send the plastics off to be shredded, granulated and recycled.” Neil relishes the chance to figure out the best way of recycling unusual objects.

I ask what is the hardest thing in the yard to recycle? Surprisingly “it’s those railway sleepers” Neil gesturing over to an enormous heap of blackened oblongs of wood. “They are covered in creosote which means we can’t classify them as non-hazardous wood.” Before ASI began to use concrete supports for their fuselages, they used these old sleepers to prop their planes up during dismantling. I suggest a bonfire, ducking as he shoots me a look that says “don’t even joke!”

A shout comes from a forklift at the gate “Room for a little one?” Simon is carrying the distinctively orange front half of an EasyJet on a forklift and sets it down on the ground. It rocks about in the wind.

Andy picks it up with one bite both the Doosan and carries it, light as a crisp packet to the middle of the yard.  It takes him and his machine 10 minutes tear up the fuselage. He pulls out wires and puts them in a pile twisting them up like spaghetti. The crushing airframe sounds like an enormous plastic cup being squeezed up and binned.

I can’t help but think of air accidents watching this. No wonder the debris of a crash is spread so wide when the aluminium skin is barely 4mm thick. Planes are strong at withstanding flying forces, but on the ground, there’s nothing much to them. The wind picks up again, blowing an unraveled oxygen mask past us and lodging it under the wheel of the 747.

Scrapping the Boeing 747

December 2023

A few months pass and I am back up at Kemble, hovering about hoping to catch the disassembly of G-CIVN the British Airways Boeing 747-400 that I keep going on about. She is the last of her kind (aside from the party plane- link on the other side of the airfield.) This time when I get collected and driven across the airfield, my chauffeur asks me if I’m part of the film crew? I say I’m a blog writer and that film crew may be overstating things but was happy nonetheless. The place is a buzz with activity. It’s a beautiful day and there are tons of small aircraft zooming around the taxi ways landing and taking off every few minutes. 

Andy’s orange Doosan is once again making light work of a 25year old A320, nibbling at her wings and unceremoniously dragging her from her concrete stands onto the ground. She is chopped up in under an hour. The plane jigsaw is grappled into the back of a Smith’s bulker lorry and taken off somewhere in the East Midlands. There is finally space to pull apart that dear 747.

Everyone goes for a brew. Amazingly they let me hang around on my own to get my cameras set up and have a nose around.

I perch my Go-Pro on a pile of spent airplane tyres at the edge of the yard and go for a wander amongst the remaining planes. It Is pretty still except for some gentle road noise and the ticking and creaks of the patient airframes, waiting in line to be sliced. The 747 is next. I stand at her side, looking up at her vast tail still brightly painted in red and blue. Her greyish horizontal stabilisers are coloured with smudges of soot in stripes and small amounts of green moss. 

I couldn’t quite believe they’d let me stay there on my own! I wandered around for 20 minutes touching the warmish rubber wheels and the coolish aluminium airframe. Some half-chopped planes sit with their cross sections exposed, the wind flapping seat covers, bits of galley, seatbelts and yellow insulation. In that moment I felt I was in a graveyard. I sat on a concrete block under a bisected Air France plane and stared at the 747. In the quiet, with the heavy machinery resting several crows landed on the tip of her tail and sat there cawing.

The guys return fuelled with tea and power up their machines again. The birds flew off.  Andy wanders over to say Hi clutching a piece of paper with chunks of airplane sketched out on it. G-CIVN had originally been destined for scrap like the others. However, her iconic fuselage has been purchased by a film production company. They will use giant pieces of her as props in a new series about the Pan Am flight 103 which was destroyed by a bomb and crashed into Lockerbie, Scotland tragically killing 270 people. 

The team chat together, their usual banter attenuated for a moment as they consider how best to pull apart this airplane in the way it is needed to tell such a devastating story. But they have to think of the practicalities as well. “They want the whole horizontal stabiliser piece intact. “We’ll have to drop the tail on the floor and cut it once it is down.”

How exactly are you going to ‘drop the tail on the floor?’ I ask. Andy winks: “Well, get out the way behind those tyres and watch!” He isn’t wildly happy today as he had ordered a shiny new crusher for this job. Unfortunately, it had been loaned out and he was making do with a slightly blunter older version, painted inexplicably in green and purple.

He stomps off, hops into his orange dinosaur and drives straight at the 747 behind her starboard wing, puncturing the fuselage with the closed crushing jaw. He snips and tears sections in a belt shape around her middle. 4 minutes pass. I notice all other work in the yard has stopped. Men are appearing as if from nowhere, 3 are atop a scissor platform, watching. Another in a fork lift craning his head around the muddy windscreen. Others standing in the gateway having driven over from the hangars. A twisting, metallic scream sounds out. Things pause for just a moment, her massive tail section held on by a thread of metal. Andy pulls the Doosan boom straight out of her belly like a knife and 80 tons of metal slam into the ground, flinging shards of aluminium sideways and creating a shock wave I felt in my core. I felt exhilaration and a strange simultaneous melancholy. 

I made a video here so you can watch and hear Andy at work and see the tail being cut off the beautiful G-CIVN.

Some were delighted to see her broken and out of the way, others were sad. Everyone, though, had an opinion. What is it about the Queen of the Skies that is so emotive? I suppose she represents something different to everybody; family adventure, allowing connection with others and dreamy engineering but also something trustworthy and protective. Once planes and ships become a ‘she’ they become more than just nicely designed useful objects, they demand some sort of emotional connection. When we tear them apart for their next phase they return to being simply resources for us to use over again. Rinse, repeat.

It takes a further 2 days to take down the 7-4 (this is what those in the business call her). All that is left of G-CIVN in Gloucestershire is a cockpit resting next to a taxi way, a few souvenir overhead lockers to be sold on eBay, and maybe the tiny square of fuselage I kept for myself.