written by Adam Thorn
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July 27, 2021
Photos courtesy of Google Earth and Microsoft Zoom Earth
In May this year, Australian Aviation published a story that became the biggest in our 40-year history, attracting a mind-boggling 80,000 views. It involved a TikTok user, Ashley Hall, who obtained footage from inside a Qantas 747 stored at a boneyard in the Californian desert. What she likely didn’t realise – that we were able to deduce from some nifty FlightAware research – was that the 747-400 in question had been sweltering in the desert, innards intact, for more than eight years.
Perhaps the reason the story did so well, I think now, was because aviation enthusiasts have a propensity to see what others consider as simply hulks of metal as something a bit more alive. Much like the Toys in