Ran When Parked

When I was a kid, a local landmark was a row of C-130's painted in Libyan air force livery, backed up against the fence of the Lockheed plant by the highway.

Built for Libya in 1972, the Nixon administration nixed the delivery of the planes when Col. Muammar started getting cozy with the Soviets all terrorist-y, so there the planes sat. Eventually, they were moved away from the fence line and...well, out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes.

They surfaced in the news again during the early days of the Libyan civil war. Apparently they were still on the grounds of the Lockheed plant, or at least the complex it shares with Dobbins Air Reserve Base and the former NAS Atlanta (now General Lucius D. Clay National Guard Center), just off in a field you couldn't see from South Cobb Drive.

I was relating this tale to a friend on Facebook this morning and went scrolling around on the Googlesat map and...holy crap, they're STILL THERE, tucked away in a couple fields. Half of them are blocked in by an L1011 and a P3, both of which look like they've had their motors pulled.

You'd think that whoever's running Libya these days would have put them up on Plane Trader or eBay Motors or something by now.
.