Man flies into Massachusetts airport only to find some iconic planes sitting there rotting away

A pilot flew into a Massachusetts airport only to find iconic planes sitting abandoned and decaying on the tarmac – including multiple Cessna 150 aircraft.

Rows of classics that once owned the sky now sit weather-beaten, wings drooping, paint fading at Plum Island Airport.

For aviation fans, the sight wasn’t just sad – it was gutting. 

Machines built to soar, reduced to relics baking in the sun.

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The sad reality behind forgotten planes at Massachusetts airport

The pilot shared photos of the airport graveyard to Reddit with the caption: “Almost all of the planes there aside from three were pretty much unairworthy and slowly rotting away.”

Among the planes pictured were several Cessna 150 models, once the backbone of flight schools across the country. 

One of the Cessna 150 appeared to be in working order at first glance, but a closer look revealed a bent wingtip. 

“N3701V looks in great shape except for that wing tip; it must have had a nasty landing,” one Redditor commented.

Another Cessna had even worse luck.

Its tail was snapped, the damage making clear this aircraft would never fly again without massive investment.

Then there was the Piper Cherokee 180, a popular four-seat cruiser grounded after a serious control failure. 

In a follow-up comment, the OP explained that it had suffered an elevator and rudder separation two years ago. 

Since then, it has been ‘in progress of being repaired’ – providing hope these planes haven’t all been forgotten.

These aren’t just random wrecks – they’re aircraft that were once sources of endless adventure.

Now they sit exposed to the elements, relics of a different era of flying. 

And at Plum Island, their slow decay is on full display for anyone who lands there to see.

Forgotten planes are everywhere

What’s happening at the Massachusetts airport isn’t unique, however.

Around the world, aircraft are being retired, abandoned, or left to rot – sometimes by the dozen, sometimes by the thousand. 

One pilot recently filmed inside a vast aircraft cemetery where 2,000 planes are waiting to be recycled, their stories ending in the desert, but with 85 percent of their parts ready for new life.

Other planes are abandoned in stranger places. 

A group of explorers stumbled across an old Boeing 737 sitting beside a highway in India and found the interior almost perfectly intact.

As if time had frozen mid-flight. 

And sometimes, forgotten planes get a revival. 

One YouTuber discovered the largest biplane in the world sitting in a field in America, a 1970s Antonov that had only a few hundred hours on its engine. 

It’s now being prepped for a comeback as a skydiving workhorse. 

Iconic aircraft don’t just disappear; they linger in odd corners of the world.

Waiting to be restored, repurposed, or left to fade away.

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