Let’s face it – airport parking has always been a pain. To park your car on–airport for three or four days can cost more than your airfare but while remote/off-airport alternatives may be cheaper, they add way too much time and effort to the already tortuous pre and post flight ritual. Over the last few weeks however, everything has changed – airport parking problems have moved from landside to airside.

If you think parking a car is a problem consider what’s involved with parking airplanes – not just for days but for weeks, months or maybe years, and not just one or two airplanes but hundreds – or actually make that thousands of them.

An unlikely warm-up act to the COVID-19 initiated parking problem came with the Boeing 737 MAX grounding in February of last year. At the time, never anticipating such a long grounding, airlines squirreled away their MAX fleets around their systems – just about every Canadian airport has a few from three Canadian operators. In Seattle, Boeing quickly ran out of space to park its undelivered MAX inventory – over 50 of them soon filled every spare inch of the company’s plants, including employee parking lots. It wasn’t until January of this year that Boeing took the step of shutting down the production line. Now, at nearly 14 months and counting, there’s still no return to service date but, even if there were, guess what? Like most of the rest of the world’s commercial fleets, right now they’d be going nowhere fast.

If “a picture paints 1,000 words…” Southwest stashed a gaggle of their MAX fleet at Victorville Logistics Airport in Southern California. In the picture below there are about 24 aircraft – about the same number of MAX’s that Air Canada has on the ground, – WestJet has 13 and Sunwing has four. But just try to imagine the pictured group multiplied by 25 and that’s about the number of aircraft Delta alone grounded over the last couple of weeks.

In Canada (over and above the MAX’s) Porter has grounded its fleet of 29 Dash 8’s, Sunwing has followed suit with its 40 or so aircraft as Air Canada and Rouge, plus WestJet, Encore et al make up several hundred more parked planes. Then there are all the other smaller carriers spread across the country that, before this is over, will surely be equally decimated.

The coronavirus outbreak has resulted in so many planes being parked that one of the few things taking off these days is the business of storing aircraft. Delta has parked a chunk of it grounded fleet, winglet-to-winglet, on a runway at Atlanta Hartsfield Airport – a strip those same airplanes were taking off and landing on a few weeks ago. Aside from major airports, remote airfields all over the globe are seeing green as airlines big and small desperately seek places to park more and more airplanes, on runways, ramps and taxiways – literally any accessible space.

In the US, the sudden, unprecedented drop in demand for air travel has seen Delta and American combined ground more than 1,200 planes. In Victorville CA, the 240-acre facility has space for more than 500 planes, plus hangars for maintenance purposes. Other storage operations are in desert facilities like Roswell, N.M. – yes, that Roswell, of UFO/alien fame – the humidity is low and the runways are long enough to accommodate even the biggest jets. Roswell’s 5,000-acre field can accommodate about 800 aircraft, and it’s filling up very quickly. Closer to home, albeit on a slightly smaller scale, even a place like Ontario’s Muskoka Airport is now home to eight Air Canada Embraer 175 jets – a scene that is becoming common all across the country.

But grounding commercial aircraft entails a lot more than just finding a big stretch of asphalt and paying the parking fees. The biggest expense is the cost of the aircraft and the services to keep them maintained and ready to return to operation. A commercial jet can’t sit indefinitely on the tarmac. If it’s going to be stored for several months, it must be put into an “airplane coma,” which involves draining or replacing all liquids and sealing the doors and engines, while avionics, hydraulics, electronics and other operating systems must be regularly checked and tested.

So, next time you find yourself complaining about lack of airport parking anywhere you go – and let’s hope it happens soon – just think back to the challenges the world’s carriers have been facing. It’s bad enough that those super-expensive birds aren’t flying and producing revenue, and that thousands of your colleagues are being laid off or furloughed, but conundrums like, “Heh, I’ve got to find space tomorrow to park another 21 wide-bodies,” is really rubbing salt in the wound.