Bangkok airplane graveyard becomes home for families

Frequent fliers may complain they sometimes feel like they live on board a plane, but that's the reality apparently facing some otherwise homeless families in Bangkok, Thailand’s capital city.

Bangkok - capital city of Thailand - at night

Unable to make enough money to rent a home, three Thai families live in disused airplanes. For them, however, there's none of the relative comforts of modern aviation.

A retired Boeing 767-200 that flew for Ansett Australia being cut open for scrap at the airplane graveyard at Mojave Airport

The planes they occupy are derelict wrecks - the skeletons of decommissioned jets, including a Boeing 747 and an aircraft once operated by Orient Thai (a domestic low cost carrier), left to rot on private land in the Ramkhamhaeng neighborhood of Bangkok. According to locals, the planes are owned by a Thai businessman who has been slowly selling off the equipment piecemeal.

Bangkok is the commercial hub of Thailand

The planes' inhabitants eke out a rough existence, collecting garbage for recycling to make a few dollars a day. Preferable to living on the street, the families are able to live rent free and say they aren’t too far from a recycling station where they can take the foraged materials they find.

Home comforts, such as they are, appear rudimentary: just a few makeshift curtains slung over airplane windows, well-used mats laid on the floor and a poster of the Thai king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, stuck on a plane wall.

United States President Barack Obama presents a gift to King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand during their meeting at Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok on 18 November 2012. The President presented an album containing photographs of the King with U.S. presidents and first ladies dating back to President Eisenhower

While Thailand has experienced strong economic growth in recent years, a wide gap still exists between the country’s rich and poor. Though the families who live on the planes are struggling to make a living in Bangkok, World Bank says poverty in Thailand is primarily a rural phenomenon. As of 2013, over 80% of the country’s 7.3 million poor live in rural areas.

Thailand has been the largest rice exporter in the world. Forty-nine per cent of Thailand's labor force is employed in agriculture

It's a far cry from the dreams of travel, adventure and possibility that airplanes conjure for many.

(All images - credit: Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licence)