Plane Convoy
Wednesday, 20th February 2008 by Rob
A strange procession is moving through the streets of Los Reyes Acozac in Mexico - the fuselages of not one, but two aircraft!
As they're roughly 100 feet in length, the giant plane bodies could be for Boeing 737s - but what would they be doing here? 737 fuselages are usually made in Wichita, Kansas, so it's a bit of a mystery why they would be in convoy through Mexico.
Discussions on the Google Earth community suggest the fuselages could actually be for McDonnell Douglas DC9/10s - which went out of production decades ago - so maybe they're being scrapped somewhere round here?
If they are scrap, hopefully they won’t be abandoned on the road as happened to one Boeing 737 making its way through Mumbai traffic last year...
Thanks to carmedic.
About the author
So I guess it’s pure coincidence that there is an airbase complete with ghost planes nearby? https://www.googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=&c=&t=k&hl=en&ll=19.756945,-99.000893&z=18
What I didn’t know, though, is that Wichita, Kansas, is so close to the Isle of Man!
Good spotting of the airbase drR.
There’s a couple of 727s on the tarmac, but it’s over an image seam so they could even be the same planes?
I fixed the Wichita link, thanks.
I notice that base too, I counted 33 helicopters there. A bit further south… check out the yellow DC-8.
https://www.googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=&c=&t=k&hl=en&ll=19.445596,-99.065598&z=18 Not sure but it might be from DHL Cargo like this one seen here…
If you look at the position of the engines it’s clear that it’s not 737s since they have the engines on the wings. I think that DC-9 is a good guess, since they have the engines on the sides of the rear end of the fuselage, like these two being transported :).
My guess is that they are Sud SE210 Caravelles. Specifically, I think one of them might be this plane.
One of the FAM units based at the airport has 727s and DC-9s on charge. However, there are two planes parked on a crude apron that have the general arrangement of an SE210 (i.e., elevators mounted midway up the vertical stabilizer, 2 engines mounted on rear fuselage). The DC9 and SE210 are both 104ft in length and have two engines attached to the rear fuselage so it would be hard to tell them apart from the air without the wings, elevators and vertical stabilizer( DC9 has elevators mounted on top of the vertical stabilizer). The FAM operated SE210s at some point but probably not for a long while since the last SE210s (in the world) were retired in 2005. SE210 might be a good call because they would probably not be airworthy, would need to be hauled out and would not show up in lists of current aircraft.
Perhaps this plane is the same type?
Those are Caravelles and they had just been sold for scrap, the owner took then to a place about 30 miles away to have then as attractions on a place where kids go swimming, there are sitting there today and they both had complete cockpit instrumentation, one of those Caravelles landed in the dirt, in the Sonoran Desert after it had been flown from South America with tons of cocaine on board, , at night many years ago, it was abandoned there and Air Force picked it up an flew it back, they never really used it so they sold it.