From Hangar to Grave: Christopher Schaberg on Dead Airplanes

Over at The New Inquiry, New Orleans’ resident air travel intellectual Christopher Schaberg provides a history of defunct airplane models and anticipates the eventual death of Boeing’s new Dreamliner aircraft, a “plane of the future” that has already begun to drift “into the friendly skies of banality.” He moves from an airplane bone yard in the American Southwest to a couple lucky leftover models that were saved from uselessness by the Romney-Ryan air-campaign. Schaberg tweeted that the article anticipates his next book, The End of Airports. He is currently the editor the website Airplane Reading (see an essay on it by Room 220 editor Nathan C. Martin) and the author, along with Mark Yakich, of Checking In/Checking Out. Schaberg and Yakich spoke to Room 220 about that book an interview last year. Stay tuned for a (long overdue) review of Schaberg’s other recent book, The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight, soon on Room 220. That book will be out shortly in paperback from Bloomsbury/Continuum.