In Memoriam …

Twenty-five-nautical-miles northwest of Tucson, in the arid desolation of the vast and vicious Sonoran Desert, a stately 747-8—gleaming white after the fashion of the world’s most improbable iceberg—waits with the eternal patience peculiar to abandoned machines for eternity to make its passage.

Day by day, the majestic aircraft bears the petty indignities of men come scurrying with tools and torches to cut away at her graceful form. Such is the lot of N458BJ, a 747-8BBJ delivered factory-new in 2012 from Boeing’s Seattle works to the Saudi Arabian Royal Flight Group. For reasons passing understanding, the grand aircraft was never pressed into service. Rather, she sat, relegated awhile to her first desert, before being relocated to Basel, Switzerland, where she would sit for ten interminable years.

During her decade of idleness and ignominy, attempts were made to sell and repurpose N458BJ. That she could have been transformed into a mighty freighter and proudly plied the world’s skies bearing the livery of Atlas, Cargolux, or Cathay Pacific is eminently possible. What is certain, alas, is that she did not. No buyer presented. No deal was struck. For all her might and promise, N458BJ remained in Switzerland—unwanted and precipitously depreciating.

On or about 15 April 2022, N458BJ touched down at Pinal Airpark (MZJ)—an infamous boneyard which, along with Davis-Monthan AFB (DMA), Kingman Airport (IGM), and Phoenix Goodyear Airport (GYR), serves as a final, if not peaceful, resting place for innumerable airplanes beyond their primes. Unmourned and uncomplaining, N458BJ taxied to her grave having accrued just over fifty flight-hours.

On 19 December 2022, crews began dismantling the ill-fated jet. For all she might have been, N458BJ will be systematically scrapped, her engines, avionics, and valuable components torn away in the names of pragmatism and monies partially recovered, her salvaged remains given over to impart airworthiness and service-life to 747s across a wide world over which she ought rightly have soared for long decades. If comfort, or at the very least a modicum of rationale is to be gleaned from the antecedent sentiment, it escapes me.

FMI: www.boeing.com