Not every boneyard is a dusty Arizona field full of stripped A320s. Scattered around the world are storage sites where retired aircraft carry stories of war, vanished airlines and abandoned space programmes — and a few are even visitable.

The strangest might be Nicosia International Airport in Cyprus. Once the island's main gateway, it was bombed during Türkiye's 1974 invasion and fell inside the UN-controlled buffer zone, where it remains to this day. In 1977, under special UN authorisation, British Airways engineers ferried out three grounded Cyprus Airways planes. A fourth — a Hawker Siddeley Trident 2E — was too badly damaged and has sat there for over 50 years, its engine cannibalised to get a sister Trident airborne. The UN still operates helicopters from the airfield, and there's talk of turning the site into a museum.

In Surrey, England, Dunsfold Aerodrome is better known as the former home of Top Gear, but aviation fans know it for its trio of retired British Airways 747s. One 747-200 has been there since 2005 and has served as a film prop; two 747-400s arrived in 2020, including one in BA's classic 'Landor' livery that's meant to be preserved as a local landmark. Visit soon, though — the airfield has been approved for redevelopment into housing.

Zhukovsky International Airport, southeast of Moscow, hides a graveyard of Soviet aviation inside a secure Gromov Flight Research Institute facility: retired MiGs and Sukhois, a Tupolev Tu-144 supersonic airliner and even an unfinished Buran space shuttle orbiter once sat there. Public access was possible during the MAKS air show, but that hasn't run since 2021, and Russia's isolation means satellite imagery is now the main window into the site.

North Carolina's Laurinburg-Maxton Airport is where the airline Northwest lives on. Charlotte Aircraft parts out retired airliners there, and the site holds an unusual cluster of former Northwest 727s, DC-10s and 747s — many still in the carrier's bold 1989 'Bowling Shoe' livery rather than the final 'NWA' colours. Northwest merged into Delta in the late 2000s, so this is one of the last places on earth to see its planes. The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum also sourced a 747 fuselage section here, from Northwest's first 747-100.

Finally, the most beautiful of the lot: Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where roughly 150 surplus American warplanes were barged out and dumped in the lagoon after WWII because there was no room to ship them home. Eight decades later, Grumman F4F Wildcats, Douglas SBD Dauntlesses and Curtiss C-46 Commandos lie intact beneath coral — a celebrated dive site for experienced underwater photographers.

Why it matters: some of these are纯粹的 aviation history you can see with your own eyes, and the clock is ticking on at least two of them. Dunsfold's 747s face an uncertain future as redevelopment proceeds, and Kwajalein's underwater fleet rewards divers now. If retired metal with a story appeals to you, these are the boneyards worth knowing about.