This abandoned airplane registered N806NK, sat many years at Meacham Field in Fort Worth Texas. It’s a McDonnell Douglas MD-81 which first flew on March 3rd, 1981. In June of that year it was delivered to Hawaiian Airlines. Leased shortly to Pacific Southwest Airlines before returning to Hawaiian. It retired from Hawaiian service in 1993, and then spent several years being moved around by other operators and owners, including a small French airline and a bank. It’s final owner was Spirit Airlines, who obtained the plane in 1999. At some point around 2005 it was retired from service, many of it’s parts such as engines were removed, and the plane was left in a field on private property at Meacham Airport with the Spirit Airlines livery still visible. It was used by the airport fire department and law enforcement as a training piece. In May of this year I visited the plane and posted pictures with the hashtag “thatabandondplane”, and the tag stuck. Eventually a few more folks stumbled upon the plane and it garnered further interest. Over 200 posts to the hashtag were made, several by users with thousands of followers, and the plane made appearances on other websites such as reddit. Evidently the city, who owns the land the plane was on, caught wind of the trespassing happening at the plane and deemed it a liability. As of last week, the plane was fully scrapped and the field is now empty. The plane may have succumb to it’s own popularity, but perhaps it’s a good thing many others got to experience and document such an interesting and unique place.
I wrote this for the instagram account "Learnsomethingnewmonday". Hope y'all have enjoyed.
