Turkey Sinks An Airbus Jumbo Jet In Aegean Sea To Attract Fish And Tourists

Ankara: It was designed to carry hundreds of travelers 30,000 feet up in the air. Now an Airbus jumbo jet lies inert some 75 feet under the surface of the Aegean Sea — not twisted into wreckage, but slowly and deliberately sunk by Turkish officials in the hopes of luring fish and tourists in droves.

On Saturday, the 36-year-old jet concluded its final voyage. The plane’s journey began in Istanbul in April, where the massive Airbus — 177 feet long with a 144-foot wingspan — had been divvied into parts and then hauled on trucks to the seaside resort town of Kusadasi.

The Airbus A300 jet is thought to be the largest plane ever used as an artificial reef, reportedly taking two-and-a-half hours to submerge. Witnesses numbered in the hundreds, “cheering and blasting their foghorns” from their boats, Agence France-Presse reported. Divers and cranes lowered the Airbus to the seabed, guiding the aircraft on rafts of floating balloons until the nose of the plane finally slipped below the Aegean Sea.

As part of its reef-building initiative, Turkish authorities recently sunk three other planes off of the Turkish coast. The Airbus — purchased from a private company to the tune of $92,000 — is by far the largest.

Artificial reefs are not new inventions. The world over, countries have repurposed a variety of would-be detritus for a second life on the seafloor. Items may be as mundane as shopping carts, or as huge and imposing as aircraft carriers - like the USS Oriskany, which now rests in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida. More recently, bespoke artificial reefs are cropping up in the shoals. Sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor, for instance, crafts statues made from a coral-friendly concrete, sinking his installations in shallow seas to encourage the growth of coral and algae while offering a place for fish to hide from predators. For his most famous piece, “The Silent Evolution”, the artist sunk 450 different life-sized statues off the coast of Mexico.

Biologists stress that artificial reefs should not be conflated with trash dumps. Any old junk will not do. Coral does not take to appliances like washing machines, for instance, their cement-like secretions thwarted by the enamel coating.

Whether or not artificial reefs are a boon to the ecosystem writ large is an open question. Researchers who measured fish populations near an artificial reef offshore from Australia in 2013 counted significantly more fish — up to 10 times more — above the reef than at distances 1,500 feet away. But some marine experts, like National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologist James Bohnsack, worry that the reefs merely relocate fish, rather than provide a space for the animals to replenish their populations.