Where Aircraft Arrivals Outpace Departures : At Mojave Airport, Irvine Firm’s Workers Maintain Grounded Planes

On the Antelope Valley Freeway, about 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, the desert stretches for miles on every side. Gray mountains are etched in the horizon. Windmills twirl in the gusting wind.

Suddenly, on the bleak landscape dead ahead appear scores of huge silver jets, their tail fins gleaming in the sun.

It’s no mirage. It’s Mojave Airport, the nation’s biggest homeless shelter for grounded planes.

The logos on the planes reveal the names of bankrupt airlines. Eastern, Midway and Pan Am are no more. Continental is operating under bankruptcy court protection. Others aren’t bankrupt, but are struggling in a cutthroat market. Braniff ceased operations last month. USAir cut back its California routes last year. And British Airways--with its logos discreetly painted over--faces stiff competition in its transatlantic routes.

With the airline industry in turmoil, planes are being idled at an astonishing rate. What better place to store them than Mojave? The airport--a former Marine base and birthplace of the globe-circling Voyager aircraft--has the space, the support operations and dry air that inhibits corrosion.

It is here, in this arid, barren land, where more than two dozen employees of an Irvine company toil in the heat. They maintain the bulk of the grounded fleet, taping up windows and intake valves with foil to keep out dust, setting wheels on steel plates and replacing oil with a pickling solution that preserves the engine.

“It’s a pretty awesome sight if you drive around and look at it,” said W.R. Laidlaw, the founder and president of Aerotest Inc. “There’s a lot of aircraft stored there, every shape and size.”

The company makes less than 10% of its revenue from taking care of nearly 100 stored planes, Laidlaw said. It only stumbled into that business because it has a larger Mojave operation that maintains and tests aircraft still flying.

Since February, 1991, the number of planes parked at Mojave has jumped from 20 to 160. With the aircraft sitting three to an acre, Mojave Airport General Manager Dan Sabovich figures he has room for as many as 1,000 planes on the airport’s 3,000 acres.

He just might need it. A few planes have made it back into service, some have been sold and others dismantled and sold piece by piece. But many just sit there. And with the body count among airlines rising, new arrivals will probably outpace departures.

“A lot of these airplanes will probably never leave here,” Sabovich said.

Nevertheless, Aerotest works for the airline companies, and not every airline wants its planes mothballed. Aerotest performs more extensive maintenance on many planes, including running engines, patching leaky fuel lines and even repainting company logos.

“Most of our customers, contrary to popular opinion, feel that they still have value in their airplanes,” Laidlaw said. “They don’t want to just dump $8 million away in the weeds of the desert.”

But the older aircraft will have a hard time finding new homes, at least in the United States, since they must compete against younger models that have far better fuel efficiency, more power, quieter engines and improved avionics.

For its parking services, the airport receives $300 to $500 per month, depending on the size of the plane, from the banks and leasing companies that own the aircraft. It then splits the fee with either Aerotest or OK Airline Support Inc., whichever maintains the planes. OK Airline works on about 60 jets at the airport.

Mojave isn’t the only airplane parking lot in the country, but it is the largest. Second in size is Evergreen Air Center in Marana, Ariz., where the number of parked planes has grown from 20 a few years ago to more than 100 today.

“It started with the recession,” said Dave Fowler, Evergreen’s president, recalling that the last big wave of jet parking occurred in the early 1980s, when deregulation resulted in many aircraft being grounded.

At Mojave, most of the planes are McDonnell Douglas DC-9s and MD-80s and Boeing 727s, but there are also DC-10s, 737s, Lockheed L-1011s and smaller commuter planes. It has even had jumbo-sized 747s and 767s parked there--some brand-new and never used, and some victims of bankruptcies and slow ticket sales--that came direct from the factory.

“I suspect that this coming fall, we’ll be increasing on the inventory of aircraft by maybe half,” said Bobby Chevalier, Aerotest’s program manager for storage operations.

While Aerotest and OK Airline keep planes in working order, some experts take a more jaundiced view of what will become of the aircraft.

“They’ll just sit out there and take the sun,” said Andrew Nocella, an analyst at Avmark Inc., an Arlington, Va., aviation consulting firm. “Hollywood will use them in a couple of movies here and there.”

There is a market for at least some of the older planes. The Federal Aviation Administration has bought a few of them, blown them up and studied the wreckage. And recently, foreign airlines have begun shopping at Mojave.

Venezuela’s Avensa Airlines, for instance, has bought eight planes there in the past 18 months. “This is the first place I come” to shop for used jets, said Victor Hernandez, an Avensa aircraft maintenance engineer.

With so many bankrupt airlines, Hernandez said, older planes are now selling at bargain-basement prices. For a 15-year-old DC-9 that Avensa can restore and fly for an additional 10 years, it might pay anywhere from $1.5 million to $3.5 million, compared to $20 million for a new plane, he said.

But of the two planes that Hernandez inspected on a recent visit to Mojave, only one met his standards. The other was consigned once again to its dusty parking space.

Rob Blankemeyer, vice president of asset management at Westinghouse Credit Corp., which has five DC-9s parked at Mojave, said Westinghouse won’t suffer any losses on its planes.

That’s because the roughly 20-year-old planes were leased to Delta, which dutifully paid its rent until the leases recently expired, leaving Westinghouse with only a small investment remaining in the planes. Westinghouse now hopes to sell or lease the planes to airlines in Asia, Latin America or Africa.

But owners of jets that were leased to bankrupt carriers are another story because the leases might have had several years remaining.

“That’s where you find people taking huge write-offs,” Blankemeyer said.

Some aircraft owners are finding that their planes are worth more in pieces.

At OK Airline, President Mike Potter said the company is dismantling four planes so their parts can be sold separately. Although younger planes have more modern technology, up to 75% of their parts haven’t changed, Potter explained.

“We get calls every day,” he said. “ ‘What are you dismantling? What do you want for the landing gear?’ ”

For the airport, which has a budget of $5 million this year, the parking fees will add roughly $350,000 in annual revenue.

“Not that I want them here,” said Sabovich, who would rather see airlines return to health. The airport also derives revenue from rents paid by Aerotest and other tenants, and from selling fuel.

That sentiment is echoed at Aerotest.

“It’s a sad thing to see,” Laidlaw said. “It’s probably one of the best economic indicators of the state of the airline industry.”

Laidlaw, an engineer and test pilot, founded the privately held company in 1986. While the home office is in Irvine, the bulk of the staff operates out of airports in Mojave, Van Nuys and Long Beach.

At Mojave, the company designs and tests new aircraft, as well as renovates old jets. The company specializes in working on wide-body, tri-engine aircraft, including the new MD-11 for the Douglas Aircraft Co. The company charges anywhere from several hundred dollars for basic maintenance to more than $1 million for major overhauls.

Its revenue from the Mojave operations, where 610 of its 770 employees work, was $23.7 million in 1991 and is expected to rise to $35.5 million this year, according to the company, partly on the strength of its latest job of maintaining the grounded jets.

Though it completed a 75,000-square-foot hangar only two years ago, the company has ambitious plans for an even larger, 120,000-square-foot hangar. Construction, however, depends on when the market improves, said Jonathan Bromberg, vice president of administration.

At Long Beach, Aerotest also designs and tests new aircraft, an operation that is expected to add $2.5 million to its revenue this year.

The company also expects to draw about $17.5 million in revenue from its corporate jet completion center at Van Nuys Airport. There, it specializes in refurbishing and customizing Gulfstream aircraft, including one owned by Irvine Co. Chairman Donald Bren.

But for now, the shaky airline industry has shifted all the media attention away from its normal work to the jet parking boom, which began last year.

“To me, (the stored planes) are not all that romantic a subject,” Laidlaw said. “And there will be no one happier than me to see all of the planes fly out of here.”

Correspondent Ted Johnson contributed to this report.