If you think finding airport parking, or finding reasonably-priced parking, is a headache, perhaps you can share some sympathy for the world’s air carriers and airports as they figure out where to park all the idled planes.
Normally, it’s not a problem, because at any given moment, thousands of them are literally ‘up in the air.’ But now, with air travel at a minimum in most places and shut down altogether in others, the planes are all on the ground at the same time.
One solution: Some airports have shut down runways to create parking space. Delta’s home field, Atlanta, has turned three of its five runways over to parked planes; Delta has more than two-thirds of its planes grounded. Atlanta is the world’s busiest airport in number of daily operations.
Paris Charles de Gaulle has closed two runways; Delhi airport in India is nearly at capacity, and several of London’s airports have been affected. Some storage space that might otherwise be available at desert storage points is not available; they’re filled with Boeing 737 MAX planes waiting the OK to start flying again. Boeing has even parked some in employee parking lots.
Photo: Twitter/KimPaquette
