A little collection of horrors for anyone who still has a soft spot for the Queen of the Skies. Some sights are perhaps better left unseen. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

During my travels around the world, I've seen quite a few discarded 747s and other relics of the past in various states of neglect and decay. Derelict machines that still have the shape, lines and presence that once earned them the nickname Queen of the Skies, but whose souls have long since left their sorry aluminium frames. Dust and grime have settled over their aluminium skeletons like a shroud of utter hopelessness.

Some have had their engines removed. Others are in various stages of dismantling, soon to be reincarnated into a million cans of soda. A few still optimistically sport worn-out engine covers, clinging to the futile hope that their abandonment is merely temporary and that their long-gone owners might yet send them around the world once more, for one last glorious flight.
A flight that will never come.

Machines that once ruled the skies, carrying millions of passengers and countless tonnes of freight around the world, are now soulless frames carrying nothing but the faded glory of times gone by.
Unceremoniously abandoned to the elements.

I look upon these sad sisters from the cockpit of my own 747, still very much alive and well, as I taxi past. Slowly lumbering towards the runway, engines whining at idle power and ready to reclaim the skies again in a few minutes' time.

Aeroplanes can't talk, think or even hear me. But I silently comfort the machine I'm flying today. Don't make eye contact, my girl. Don't worry. We'll be out of this graveyard in no time.

Not long after, we roar along the runway at incredible speed as I gently raise the nose towards the vast skies ahead, leaving this field of silent decay behind.

Or, as Dante Alighieri wrote in his 14th-century epic The Divine Comedy, upon finally emerging from the depths of Hell:

“Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.”