Nick Oxford/Reuters
- The spread of COVID-19 has led demand for air travel to plummet around the world.
- As airlines have canceled flights and grounded planes due to the novel coronavirus, they've increasingly turned to the world's airports in their search for new places to store those planes.
- New images from satellite technology company Maxar show runways and taxiways, which would normally be busy with active traffic, reduced to parking lots for the world's jets.
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As COVID-19 spreads around the world, air travel has come to a virtual halt.
Between shelter-in-place orders, border closures, travel bans, and social distancing advisories, demand for air travel has also plummeted, leading airlines to suspend routes, cancel flights, ground huge portions of their fleets, and give early retirements to older planes.
Flights that are still operating are often nearly empty.
As airlines continue to cut both long-haul and short-haul flying, in some cases reducing their capacity 70-80% for April, they're running out of places to store their grounded planes. Retired planes can go to typical storage facilities, or "bone yards," where they can be stored, scrapped, or stripped for parts.
But for planes that are just temporarily grounded, boneyards aren't always an option. These aircraft require regular maintenance and inspections, even when grounded, in order to stay in flightworthy shape.
To that end, some airlines are storing more planes at airports. With fewer flights taking off, airports aren't necessarily using as many runways or taxiways as they normally would be, meaning airlines can store their active, but grounded, fleets there.
Maxar Technologies, a satellite communications and imaging company, released new satellite images of three airports in Europe and the US where planes are being stored. The photos reveal collections of planes large and small that sit idle as the travel industry waits to return to normal.
Take a look at the satellite pictures below.
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