An Epitaph to Boeing 737-200, Serial No. 22071

Boeing Renton Factory, Washington, USA (If it ain’t Boeing, it ain’t going)

The Boeing 737-200, serial no. 22071 (which will now be referred to as just its serial number) was one of 1,114 737-200s built at the Boeing Company’s Renton plant in Washington, United States of America (Boeing, 2018; Sloan, 2013). The manufacturing of a large, complex commodity like an airliner would mean to the local Washingtonian plant workers revenue, significance in the international aerospace industry (as Boeing itself is a major producer of airliners), employment opportunities, and as the sum of all three of those: individual stability. 

Serial no. 22071

Boeing 737-200; mfd. 1979, Renton, Washington, USA

There are parts manufacturers the world over who are involved in the assembly of a 737 and who ostensibly enjoy portions of the above effects. This can be surmised from that the new 737-MAX airliner is made up of over 600,000 parts, according to The Boeing Company’s website (2018). However, tracking down where all of those parts come from is not practical here. What is practical is identifying what the newly-assembled 737-200 brings going forward.

22071 had just rolled off the assembly line and it’s 1979. The facility was repurposed to assembly of the 737- series 14 years prior and production was doing the Renton area well. Population was increasing in the area as jobs were increasing in number and scope (with the U.S. Census Bureau [2017] finding a 19% increase in population between 1970 and 1980). America had recovered fairly from the OPEC oil embargo, and there was once again a (measured) freedom of travel (Council on Foreign Relations, 2014), making air travel quite profitable again.

By Kopytoff’s (1986) definition of a thing that can be traded for money, 22071 is a commodity. Its sale price is not publicly available, but Boeing is a large commercial company that operates in cash revenue, so its trade for currency can be presumed. However, as the Renton facility is not co-located with a passenger terminal, the 737 is not a commodity that exchanges in the local community. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is a nearby major airport and workers might occasionally fly aboard one of the planes they helped create, but the 737-200 is a translocal commodity built for businesses in the late stage of the drive to commoditization (Kopytoff, 1986, p. 72) around the world to own and operate.  In this fashion, then, 22071 made the long trip to Denmark.

Maersk Air (A plane with an atltitude)

Maersk, the maritime shipping supergiant of the North and by that measure a company that could exist nearly alone in its own sphere of exchange (Kopytoff, 1986, p. 71), went on a brief foray into commercial air travel and purchased 22071 fresh off the assembly line. The original purpose of Maersk’s purchase of 22071 isn’t clear (all sources are in Danish), but the small size of Denmark, long range of a 737-200, and number of competing, already established airlines in Denmark at the time can logically lead to Maersk’s leasing in 1980 of 22071 to a foreign airline, Arab International Aviation Company. 

Records of this airline aren’t clear. According to RZJets, it was an Egyptian airline. Egypt in the early 1980s was experiencing a newly-formed economic and political alliance with the United States vice the Soviet Union (Jordan, 1997). This American aircraft might have been seen, depending on what role the aircraft played in the Egyptian economy, as a way to embrace a new global trade partner. Also, aircraft such as 22071 require maintenance at frequent and complex intervals. This would mean employment opportunities and training in highly marketable, globally applicable skills to local Egyptians. 

Finally, a 737 is capable of medium- to long-range flight, enabling the importation and exportation of goods at higher volume. If used for cargo purposes, 22071, then, might have been seen as a valuable tool for spreading Egyptian culture and importing foreign culture to Egyptian traders and merchants. If used expressly as a passenger airliner, it might have represented a valuable tool for escape from a country that was in the midst of a political upheaval-by-assassination and a few decades of extremist terrorism (Murphy, 2003).

Several Global Northern Leases Later (At Lease-t It’s Still Flyin’)

During 22071’s lease to Arab International Aviation Company, Maersk sold it to Guinness Peat Aviation in 1981, but its tenure as a leased asset was far from over. Guinness Peat Aviation was an Irish conglomerate company (one of the founders of whom was Tony Ryan, who would later go on to start RyanAir) that specialized in the purchasing and subsequent leasing of aircraft. 22071 played one part in the larger imperative that Guinness Peat was up to: helping Ireland recover from its depression (Flynn, 1999). 

Ireland came out of the 1970s with a degraded economic standing in Europe (Mitchell & Clemens, 2003). The rise of Guinness Peat Aviation to the world’s largest aircraft leasing firm (Flynn, 1999) ostensibly meant good things to the Irish economy. During Guinness Peat’s ownership of 22071, it saw leased employment to the British Monarch Airlines and Orion Airways, Midway Express (an American airline), and Dragonair (a Hong Kong airline). In these functions, 22071 served the same function to Global Northern countries as do tens of thousands of other aircraft: utilities for travel, an intermediary to get from one place to another. In all of these cases, seat tickets and cargo space are the prototypical Kopytovian commodities being exchanged for money. As these are all Global Northern countries, there is not much variation between values it provided among them.

In 1992, while under lease to Dragonair, 22071 changed ownership to the aircraft-leasing Californian supergiant: International Lease Finance Corporation (ILFC). To a multibillion dollar company that at one point owned 847 airplanes, a large amount of them 737s (Wayne, 2007), 22071 probably didn’t have much of an exchange impact on ILFC or its locality. The trajectory of leasing did continue, but this time with a notable change.

Towards the Global South (This Plane Is El Salv-Adorable!)

Most commercial aircraft meet one of two ends: mothballing for salvaging purposes in a desert “boneyard,” or use until critical failure. Core ICAO countries (generally Global Northern countries with major aviation manufacturing sectors and strong politics regarding production and use of commercial aircraft) have very stringent regulations on overuse of aircraft, but enforcement in peripheral ICAO countries (generally Global Southern countries without a strong aviation sector) is sometimes lacking. There is a notable pattern among this aircraft migration: once an aircraft makes the trek from the Global North to the Global South, it generally doesn’t make the journey back (Langewiesche, 2007).

22071 found itself under the ownership of a Global Northern company but in a Global Southern company’s hands: TACA International Airlines in El Salvador. This, though not the first of this instance (as we recall from the Maersk-Arab deal), calls into an interesting light Kopytoff’s idea of a commodity existing simultaneously in multiple spheres of exchange (1986, p. 82): 22071 was at the same time a commodity that commanded a value in the Californian sphere of exchange as a commodity owned (and able to be traded), a different value in the airline’s sphere of exchange as a leased commodity (with no ability to be traded but with an ability to create commodities in seat tickets and cargo space), and yet another, different value to the Central American traveler who could commoditize travel aboard 22071 in different ways (for example, a traveling salesman or -woman who can use the airliner to broaden his or her business reach). 

This is compounded in the latter two exchange spheres, as the airline was in the midst of a Pan-American expansion. As well as being a similar tool of employment and high skills training for local citizens, 22071 was a tool of revenue for the airline, which had a much smaller fleet than that of its lessor, IFLC. Furthermore, what made leasing profitable for both sides is that the monthly cost of leasing was comparatively less than an all-out purchase, equity notwithstanding (Wayne, 2007). This meant that TACA could operate 22071 with a higher annual profit margin, which eventually enabled the airline to buy majority shares of major airlines in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. 

It was for the latter, Costa Rica’s LACSA (which then became the modern day’s Avianca, overtaking TACA early the next century), that 22071 worked. In this role, 22071 served to interlink cultures in the Americas with greater brevity: its long range and cheap cost to operate made Pan-American travel accessible and relatively affordable to Central and Southern Americans. Increased Pan-American mobility is a tenet of translocality, as discussed by Greiner and Sakdapolrak (2013). In regions of Central and South America, where national borders might present on-the-ground trade barriers (such as the Colombian-Panamanian border, where the Panamanian government refuses to build a road through the jungle to Colombia [Miller, 2014]), transportation nodes that bolster translocal vice transnational movement could be said to provide access to multiple levels of commodity exchange. 

To Africa (Safari, So Good)

Now informally geofenced in the Global South, 22071 made yet another ownership change. IFLC sold the jet to AAR Corporation in April of 2004. AAR Corporation is another holding company that primarily services the commercial air industry with parts and repair. While this biography might make it sound like aircraft holding companies are plenty, they’re a complex society, by Kopytoff’s definition (1986): the sheer amount of capital it takes to amass a fleet of aircraft notwithstanding, the operating cost, especially when an aircraft isn’t employed, is tremendous enough to make aircraft holding and leasing a fairly restricted society with its own set of drivers on value. After sustaining four months of unemployment, 22071 picked up a lease contract for National Airways in South Africa. Over the Atlantic it flew for the last time.

Climbing in economic status after Apartheid, South Africa spent the 2000s building global partnerships. Nationwide Airlines was following suit with increased international routes to the United Kingdom. However, tragedy was to strike for one of 22071’s coworkers. 

In 2007, a catastrophic structural failure in another 737-200’s engine support pylons resulted in the entire right engine falling off shortly after takeoff. The subsequent company investigation by South Africa’s Civil Aviation Authority unraveled a plurality of maintenance noncompliances, which destroyed the airline’s regional reputation. This led to the airline ceasing operations in 2008 (“Terror in the Sky,” 2007), leaving 22071 unemployed again. 

Shortly thereafter, the AAR Corporation stayed within the Global Southern geofence and leased the aircraft to Lignes Aériennes Congolaises: Congolese Airlines. 22071’s venture into the Global South became nigh irreversible at this point: all aircraft operating under a Congolese (either nation) registration are banned from operations within the European Union ("List of Air Carriers," 2014). Whatever potential 22071 had to bring the same thing, cheap transportation as a leased asset to regional and international trade partners of mercantiles and people, to the Congolese people as it did to the South African people might have been stunted, as European countries could potentially have been major Global Northern air transport partners that 22071 could’ve made trips to. 

Furthermore, the E.U. bans on air carrier operations came about due to safety invalidations after inspections. A Global Northern air carrier, then, that would purchase or operate otherwise an aircraft after a tenure in a banned country would be accepting an incredible risk: this is why the Democratic Republic of the Congo or a similarly branded country (currently, 15 African countries have banned airlines [“List of Air Carriers,” 2018]) will likely be 22071’s grave. 

Sign-off

As a commodity, a Boeing 737-200 is distinctly non-singularized: each time it changed hands, there was very likely a monetary transaction and it indeed changed hands often across several (geographic and economic) spheres of exchange. All of the owners didn’t operate in the same sphere of exchange: differing levels of capital and different intended uses meant different values affected onto the aircraft by different agents.

As for 22071, Congolese Airlines was liquidated in 2013 in order to balance capital for the new flagship airline, Congo Airways (RDC, 2015). At this point, federal records are quiet and, for the time being, one is left to wonder where 22071 is spending its days and what value it has. Airplanes don’t have a per annum lifespan, but at this point, 22071 is 39 years old and has endured somewhat steady service for those nearly four decades. The future is unclear, but as William Langewiesche (2007) suggests, that plane might just continue to provide whatever value it can until its wings fall off.

Methodology

 There is no publicly available information on the historical cost of transactions involving this aircraft (cost of purchase, lease, airfare, et cetera). Qualitative values will then be discussed in lieu of these.

As a Boeing 737-200 is a complicated machine sourced from hundreds of thousands of parts (Boeing, 2018), this article will serve more as an abstraction than an intricate narrative, discussing the broader strokes of its manufacturing and movements. Furthermore, literature on individual aircraft serial numbers is lacking and drawing a conclusive history involves interpolation of government registries. The further those governments are, politically, from the core International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) countries (to be detailed later), the spottier those records get. Lines will be drawn between missing data and those lines will be explicitly described as such: logical reasoning. This includes specific routes the aircraft has served, which would be relevant to some of the cultures in which mobility to domestic or international locations is important.

All of the data of aircraft ownership, leasing, and registration come from two aggregator websites, Planespotters and RZJets, which pull information from registries of multiple countries. In each case, changes of ownership, leasing, or registration is cross-referenced between the two and, for English examples, with the federal databases.

References

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The European Commission. (2014, April 10). List of Air Carriers of Which All Operations Are Subject to a Ban Within the EU, With Exceptions. Retrieved from https://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1397175146679076&date=@0&fromform=1

The European Commission. (2018, June 14). List of Air Carriers of Which All Operations Are Subject to a Ban Within the EU, With Exceptions. Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/transport/sites/transport/files/air-safety-list_en.pdf

Flynn, G. (1999, December 28). GPA soared before crash-landing. The Independent. Retrieved from https://www.independent.ie/business/gpa-soared-before-crashlanding-26130164.html

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Langewiesche, W. (2007, July). Congo from the Cockpit. Vanity Fair. Retrieved from https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/07/congo-flights-africa-airlines

Miller, S. W. (2014). Minding the Gap: Pan-Americanisms Highway, American Environmentalism, and Remembering the Failure to Close the Darien Gap. Environmental History, 19(2), 189-216. doi:10.1093/envhis/emu002

Mitchell, D. J., & Clemens, J. (2003). Tax Competition Helps the Global Economy (Publication). Vancouver: Fraser Institute.

Murphy, C. (2003). Passion for Islam: Shaping the modern Middle East: The Egyptian experience. London: Simon & Schuster.

Planespotters.net. (2018, January 7). 9Q-CLG Lignes Aériennes Congolaises (LAC) Boeing 737-200. Retrieved November 15, 2018, from https://www.planespotters.net/airframe/Boeing/737/9Q-CLG-Lignes-Aeriennes-Congolaises/wk5MfKP1

RDC : Un avion des Lignes Aériennes Congolaises cloué au sol. (2015, August 21). Radio Okapi. Retrieved from https://archive.is/20160927231247/http://www.radiookapi.net/2015/08/21/actualite/societe/rdc-un-avion-des-lignes-aeriennes-congolaises-cloue-au-sol

RZJets.net. (n.d.). CN 22071. Retrieved November 15, 2018, from https://rzjets.net/aircraft/?typ=11183

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Terror in the sky: Engine falls off plane, pilot flies to safety. (2007, November 8). CNN. Retrieved from http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/africa/11/08/emergency.landing/index.html#

U.S. Census Bureau. (2017, July 1). QuickFacts: Renton City, Washington. Retrieved November 16, 2018, from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/rentoncitywashington/PST040217

Wayne, L. (2007, May 10). The Real Owner of All Those Planes. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/business/10flyboy.html