This is where planes go when they die. Vast hulks of metal that cost millions to build, now grounded in obsolescence, taken out to the boneyard to be shot in the head like Old Yeller. Their long neat lines look a lot like the white tombs of fallen soldiers at Arlington cemetery, seemingly endless in number, waiting for the day they will be hacked open like sheet-metal pinatas to get at the valuable guts within. Fallen soldiers at a final roll call in the boneyard. The boneyard is just one part of the Mojave Air and Space Port, the same …
Seoul’s ruined Jumbo Jet, the Juan T. Trippe
The Juan T. Trippe Jumbo Jet was once the crown jewel of the Pan Am fleet, built in 1970 as the world’s first commercial jumbo jet. Now it’s the shabby ruin of a high-concept restaurant in Seoul, South Korea. I visited in the summer of 2009, with SY. This is the story of our explore, and the story of how such a historic plane ended up in such bizarre circumstances. Nose cone of the Juan T. Trippe I was in Korea to visit SY’s family and get to know something about her country. On our trip we visited all the …
Awesome abandoned theaters in the USA
Cinema is the American cultural export, a clearinghouse genre jam-packed with iconic images, historical rewrites, and the changing face of the Western hero.
7 Bizarre Monuments of Saddam’s Iraq
When Iraq lost the war to Coalition Forces back in 2003 the iconic image was one of American soldiers tearing down a great bronze statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. Soon after giant busts of his head were removed from the Palace of the Republican Guard. These destructions were symbols of victory, symbols of an end to tyranny. But in the half-war half-rebuilding period that followed, Iraqis were faced with hundreds more remnants of Hussein’s 24-year rule, monuments written in bronze and stone across the country. Was it right to tear them all down, thereby erasing any memory of …
Relics of America’s youth: Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas
Way back in 1825, with the revolutionary war 49 years past and the purchase of Florida from Spain only 5 years gone, America still very much feared attack by a foreign power. Inspectors were sent to the Dry Tortugas in the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico to source sturdy islands for fortification. 21 years later Fort Jefferson was built on sandy Garden Key, designed to consolidate the young country’s coastal defences and secure her lines of naval trade. Fort Jefferson, over 100 years ‘abandoned’ For only 42 it saw active military service, in Federal hands for the Civil War, …
