Hello, flight fans, and welcome to Mojave, California and the Mojave Airport, home to the world's largest airplane graveyard, where old planes come to peacefully die while parked on a runway. (Which I think everyone will agree is better than the alternative of croaking while 35,000 feet straight up...) Have you ever heard the one about elephants all wandering off to die in one specific, hidden place? Well, it's sort of the same concept, only with 747's instead of pachyderms, and you're unlikely to find any ivory tusks here.

Yep, the airplanes you see behind the beans have officially been mothballed - forced into retirement. Nearly 200 airplanes now sit along the runway with their engines and windows covered with tape to keep the sand and dirt out. A properly sealed plane can be stored for years in the desert, thanks to the lack of harsh winters or humidity. Some will eventually be resold ("Here at Crazy Ernie's Used Plane Lot, our prices are INSANE!"), while many of the aircraft are serviceable, and are just being stored between jobs.

So, what's to become of all of these poor planes? Are they destined to become - gasp! - recycled aluminum cans for black beans? Well, as nice as that pseudo-reincarnation pipedream may be, it's not the case. Those that have flown their last miles will end up as spare parts (sort of like your neighborhood auto junkyard, only a whole lot bigger...). As for the rest, they'll be recycled into scrap metal. Seems like a shame, doesn't it? From first class to furnace in less time than it takes to adequately digest one of those airliner meals...

Of course, once the pilots land the plane and park it for good, they'll need to get back to point A somehow, right? I mean, you can't fly it back out again... So the beans were kind enough to pick up a couple of hitchhiking pilots, who delighted them for hours with colorful stories about seeing mysterious objects in the sky while flying over Roswell, New Mexico. Ah, if they only knew what the beans know...