Photo of John Travolta’s ‘rotting’ item raises eyebrows online: ‘Sitting outside for years’
Photo Credit: Getty Images
As one of the most famous celebrity pilots out there, John Travolta has reportedly logged more than 5,000 hours of flight time throughout his career. Many of those hours were likely inside his Boeing 707, which he purchased in 1998.
After nearly 20 years of ownership, Travolta agreed to donate his “beloved” plane to the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society in Australia in 2017.
However, as discovered by one curious Redditor, a large section of Travolta’s plane was spotted rotting away at their local airport just eight years later. They took to r/Airplanes to share their find and potentially find some answers as to why it was there.
Photo Credit: Reddit
“I am a flight instructor who flies out of the airport where John Travolta’s old Boeing 707 has been sitting since he sold it,” the Redditor wrote in their post.
The Redditor said that workers had recently cut the tail off the plane a few months prior to their post. Despite its previous owner and its curious situation, the tail was left to sit on wooden pallets in an abandoned warehouse parking lot, “rotting away.”
Generally, old airplanes can be salvaged, especially if they are still in decent shape. Dismantling an aircraft can be an excellent source for valuable parts and raw materials such as metals and vital components, which can then be resold or recycled.
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Whether a grounded plane or any other large item, their improper disposal can send large amounts of waste to landfills or end up scattered throughout the environment as litter. This includes the creation of microplastic pollution and the potential leaching of hazardous materials, such as hydraulic fluids and oils, which can contaminate soil and water.
In the comment section, one user seemed to have a plausible explanation for the current state of the plane.
“The picture is misleading,” they explained. “It looks old because that’s how it came off the aircraft. The whole plane itself has been sitting outside for years, the tail got taken off and was sat outside for not long and is getting shipped over very soon to HARS. The whole plane is being shipped over and is being restored to taxi condition only and not flying condition.”
The commenter’s account was backed up by a recent Facebook post from the society. HARS noted that performing maintenance on the plane on site was “not practical,” leading to it being taken apart before being pieced together.
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“Will it be airworthy once again? We will just have to see how far we can go,” HARS wrote in the post.
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