This weekend, French aircraft graveyard Chateuaroux released stunning, but sad, drone footage of some of the British flag carrier's grounded fleet.
Airlines around the globe have, unfortunately, needed to send their aircraft into storage as a result of the current decline in travel demand. This has included British Airways, which has grounded the vast majority of its fleet.
Last week we took a pictorial look at how Lufthansa was storing its fleet at Frankfurt Airport. However, this weekend we discovered breathtaking drone footage of British Airways' stored Airbus A380 fleet. It comes as a number of different airports have been able to film drone footage thanks to a lack of airline operations.
Six A380s in a row
Currently, six of British Airways' Airbus A380 aircraft are parked at Chateauroux Airport in France. These are G-XLEA, G-XLEC, G-XLEF, G-XLEI, G-XLEJ, and G-XLEL. The aircraft flew out to the French airport last Monday and Tuesday. Upon arrival they were all lined up neatly on a taxiway, which this stunning footage from the airport shows:
Not the only airline grounding fleets
British Airways is, of course, not the only airline that has been forced to ground aircraft as a result of the current lack of demand for travel. In fact, for a large number of airlines, particularly EU airlines, the majority of their fleet is parked up. When we looked a couple of weeks ago, British Airways had appeared to have grounded around half of its widebody fleet.
However, the picture looks much worse for other airlines. In fact, when Simple Flying last studied the data, the entire Norwegian Boeing 787 fleet appeared to have been grounded. Meanwhile, Frankfurt Airport currently looks like an aircraft graveyard due to a large number of parked Lufthansa aircraft at the airport. Some of these likely won't fly for the German flag carrier again.
However, other non-European airlines have also been forced to ground aircraft. For example, Hong Kong Airport has rows and rows of parked Cathay Pacific aircraft. Meanwhile, airlines in the United States have taken over some airports in order to store aircraft.
Let us hop back to the United Kingdom briefly, and look at London's third busiest airport, Stansted. Here, the airport's police force took the opportunity to fly their drone high above the many parked Ryanair Boeing 737s that are being used for ghost flights. You can see that footage here:
Have you seen any parked aircraft as a result of the current situation? Let us know your experiences in the comments!