Grounded

You find it from the road, which is the only way anyone finds it. You come along the edge of the Kasagh gorge outside Ashtarak and there’s a passenger jet up on the rocks — full size, on its own gear, propped on concrete blocks, sitting on a shelf of black basalt with nothing around it that has anything to do with flying. No runway. No apron. Not even a fence. Just a plane on a cliff.

It’s a Yakovlev Yak-40, built at the Saratov aviation plant in 1977. The Yak-40 was the first jet in the world designed for short regional routes — small enough to get in and out of grass and dirt strips, which is why the Soviet Union built over a thousand of them, for all the places that never got a proper airport.

This one went to the Armenian department of the Soviet Ministry of Civil Aviation the year it was built, and flew as USSR-88256. It carried passengers for around two decades. When the union collapsed the plane stayed where it was and changed identity along with the country — it entered the fleet of Armenian Airlines as EK-88256. It was retired in 1997.

Sometime in the early 2000s somebody dragged it up onto the rocks above the river and left it there.

What I couldn’t find is why. No record of who moved it, no plan it was part of, no explanation. It’s just there.

Up on the wing

You can climb it, and that’s what makes this one. Over the wing root and up, and then you’re standing on top of a Soviet airliner in the middle of an August afternoon, gorge dropping away on one side, the edge of town on the other. The paint up there has gone in layers — white over blue over white — so the whole wing reads like a map of somewhere. The tail stands over you at the far end of it. I have wanted to do exactly this at every dead airframe I have ever walked past behind a fence, and here there was nothing stopping me.

Inside, it’s been taken down to the ribs. The cabin is a bare tube — frames and stringers running all the way to the tail, floor beams with no floor left on them — and yet the windows are all still in, still round, still clear enough to look through. The cockpit is the same kind of stripped: control columns standing in an empty shell, glass gone, seats gone, sun coming straight through where the instruments were.

Nothing about it is protected and nothing about it is explained. It has just been left up there to come apart slowly in the open, paint peeling off in sheets, windows open to the wind, thirty years after the last time anybody flew it.

I stayed on the wing until it got too hot to sit on, then drove north to spend the rest of the day at the telescope.