Almost every retired airliner ends the same way. It sits in a desert or a Turkish boneyard, the engines come off, the useful parts are stripped, and what is left goes through a shredder.

TC-JDL got a second life instead. The Airbus A340-311 was cut up, loaded onto fourteen trucks, driven across Kocaeli province and bolted back together as a science centre where children could climb through a long-haul airliner.

On Saturday afternoon it caught fire. Video from the scene shows the tail section giving way and dropping onto a fire engine.

Twenty-one years on the line

Airbus rolled TC-JDL out in 1994 as manufacturer serial number 057, an early A340-300 built when the four-engined type still looked like the future of long-haul flying. Turkish Airlines took it new in July that year and named it “Ankara”.

It spent more than two decades on the airline’s long-haul routes. From 2008 it carried the striking black-and-white Star Alliance scheme, and in 2013 it was renamed “Malazgirt”. Turkish Airlines withdrew it in March 2015 and parked it at Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen, where it was taken apart in 2016.

Fourteen trucks and a reassembly

What happened next is genuinely unusual. Rather than being scrapped outright, the surviving structure was taken to Şekerpınar, and in 2018 it was split across fourteen lorries, hauled to Çayırova and put back together.

Reassembled, the aeroplane is 64 metres long with a wingspan of about 60 metres, and it has stood since then at the UçakPark science centre on Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu Caddesi in the Şekerpınar neighbourhood, used for education programmes on aviation and science.

Preserving an airliner is far harder than preserving a fighter. A widebody fuselage is enormous, expensive to move, expensive to shelter and mostly made of aluminium that corrodes if you leave it outside. The great majority of retired A340s have already gone through the shredder, and TC-JDL was one of the very few that did not.

Saturday afternoon

The fire started at around three in the afternoon on 5 September. Thick black smoke rose over the site and flames took hold of parts of the fuselage. Kocaeli Metropolitan Municipality fire crews were dispatched and brought it under control after a lengthy effort.

The dramatic moment, captured on video and widely shared, came when the burnt tail section broke away and fell onto a fire appliance. Turkish reports describe panic at the scene, after which crews increased safety measures and continued fighting the fire.

Neither the cause of the fire nor the full extent of the damage has been established. The municipality says that will become clear after the inspection.

Turkish local coverage of the fire at the UçakPark science centre, including the moment the tail section collapses.

Why this one hurts

The A340 is already close to extinct in passenger service. It was the wrong aeroplane at the wrong moment: four engines and the fuel bill that goes with them, arriving just as twin-engined widebodies were cleared to fly the same routes for less money. Airbus built 377 of them and stopped in 2011.

That makes every surviving airframe worth something to the people who care about this stuff, and it makes the ones that escaped the scrapyard genuinely rare. TC-JDL was a working exhibit rather than a static monument, which is rarer still.

Whether it can be repaired is unknown. A fire severe enough to drop the tail is a serious structural event, and this aircraft was never going to fly again anyway. The question is whether the children of Kocaeli still have an airliner to walk through.

Sources: Kocaeli Metropolitan Municipality statement; Kocaeli Gazetesi; Kocaeli Denge; aeroTELEGRAPH.