For the past 30 years, Mark Gregory’s Air Salvage International (ASI) has been assessing, chopping up, disassembling, and recycling planes at the private airfield, which sits two miles from Kemble in Gloucestershire
Where do planes go when they die? For the past 30 years, Mark Gregory’s Air Salvage International (ASI) has been assessing, chopping up, disassembling, and recycling planes at the ends of their lives at the private airfield, which sits two miles from Kemble in Gloucestershire.
Armed with redundancy money in the early ’90s, Mark bought his first plane and spent six months breaking it down into sellable bits. More than 1,400 aircraft later, the business is thriving and employs dozens of people to meet the growing demand of the ever-expanding aviation industry.
And there are big bucks at stake. The equivalent of a commercial jet’s MOT costs around £1 million, which is why many plane owners decide to send their ageing aircraft to Mark instead. Sometimes, as much as £12 million can be salvaged from them, either as reusable parts or as recyclable materials.
There are a few other strings to the business’s bow, Mark explained as he took me on a tour around the facility. ASI puts on dramatic training scenarios for organisations including the SAS, helping them practise plane-related emergencies. One mock-up situation had Mark and his team crush a van with a plane fuselage, creating a tricky day out for the special forces, who also had to deal with hijackers and “injured” passengers on board.
One particularly interesting aircraft that ended up with Mark is a VIP-fitted Boeing 727 that was once part of Saddam Hussein’s fleet, after he instructed Iraqi Airways to steal all of Kuwait Airways’ planes during its 1990 invasion of the country.
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