…Abandoned In Chiang Mai.
If you travel east along highway 1014 out of Chiang Mai, a road that doesn’t seem to go anywhere in particular, after about twenty kilometers, sitting at the side of the road, you’ll find this…
It’s a bit of a WTF moment. As in, WTF is it? and WTF is it doing there?
Well, after some research I can answer the first – and I’ll come back to that – but the second one is a mystery.
Looks like someone’s stolen the wings…
Look around some more and you will uncover all kinds of goodies, like airport buses…
… and bits of fuselages…
… not to mention trucks and other assorted junk..
Then you discover a rough gravel road that leads over a crossroads into another field, which reveals this…
Well, that looks a bit more interesting. Yes, a Thai Airways A300-600 Airbus, sitting in a field. And why not? This is Thailand. Always expect the unexpected. Getting it into the field must have been a huge challenge. It obviously didn’t fly there nor crash there. The wings are in place but not attached, so I’m guessing it was transported in at least three pieces. Still a challenge.
Although the paint is faded it’s still quite elegant really…
…even more so from the air, where the many blemishes and missing parts are not so obvious…
At one point Bert decided he was going to tow it away but that was never going to work…
So what’s the story here? Glad you asked. I still have no idea why they are there but I assume it’s just a giant scrap yard, and one day someone will come along and start tearing them apart. But I have managed to find the histories.
The Airbus was fairly easy as the registration is clearly visible. It was delivered to Thai Airways in 1990 and eventually scrapped in 2014. I can’t find any reason for that. Old age I guess. 24 years is not a bad lifespan for an airliner.
The other thing though, that heap of junk alongside the road, was a bit more of a challenge. There are very few markings except for KVO and something covered in white tape. I took a guess that it was also Thai registered and hunted for info about HS-KVO.
It turns out it was a twin turboprop airplane (hard to guess this without the wings) operated by Phuket Airlines, that fell off the runway at Mae Sot in 2005, was badly damaged and then scrapped. Luckily the 32 people on board who fell off the runway with the ‘plane were not damaged nor scrapped!
The airplane though is quite unusual, and not something I would have guessed in a million years. It’s a YS-11 built by Nihon Aircraft Manufacturing Corporation in Japan.
So now you know. Seriously boring. Back to our regularly scheduled articles next time.