Really good long read from Guardian on the state of the airline industry.
What it takes to store planes at Schipol is fascinating:
Fuel tanks were emptied, although not entirely: “You still need some weight in the plane, for the bursting wind we get here in Amsterdam.” The blades of the engine fans were locked into place with straps, so that, on gusty days, they didn’t whirl around endlessly and wear their parts out.
Every seven days, someone would climb into the plane and run the engines for 15 minutes to keep them functional. The air conditioning was switched on to keep the humidity at bay. “And the tyres – well, it’s the same as a car. If you keep a car parked for more than a month, you get flat tires,” Dortmans said. So a tug pulled the plane forward and back every month, to keep the wheels and axles in shape.
Still, there were some surprises. In the absence of the roar of jets, birds began to appear around Schiphol again, and one day, a ground engineer told Dortmans that he’d found a bird starting to nest in a cavity in the auxiliary power unit. “I’m hearing all these birds and now I find this,” he told Dortmans. “It feels like I’m out in the woods.”
