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 a private airfield 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.
Big money in aircraft salvage
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 a journalist 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.
Saddam Hussein's VIP jet
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.
While most of the firm's planes get broken down and flogged off, Mark Gregory can't bear to give up certain flying machines that come his way. Mark was keen to keep the dictator's jet, which is decorated with plush velvet seats and wood paneling.
When owned by the Kuwaiti royal family, the 189-seat jet was stripped of its standard seats and kitted out with enough furniture to fill a retirement village. That includes plush velour seats with extendable footrests, cutting-edge JVC TVs built into mahogany walls, and glass vases filled with plastic roses next to still-unopened bottles of bubbly.
Crash site investigation work
Another offshoot of the business is crash site investigation. Although downed planes rarely make it to ASI due to the extent of the damage, members of Mark's team are occasionally called out to inspect the aftermath of major aviation tragedies.
Their expertise in breaking aircraft down makes them particularly useful when it comes to identifying remains and helping determine what went wrong. They were part of the investigation into the Afriqiyah Airways crash in Tripoli, Libya, in 2010, which killed 104 people.
