“I was with a group examining the recently uncovered remains of a petrol station when Muhammad Bakir, a grad student of mine, wanted to try out his brand new optical set by climbing up a sand dune and having a look around. Now, I didn’t trust Scanning-Opticals at the time. I was adamant that you could never match the accuracy or dependability of traditional optics (imagine my surprise when they became standard issue at the Archeological Corp just a year later). So when Bakir told me that he saw a “weird shadow” way off in the distance, I simply brushed it off as a visual artifact. Fortunately, he was smart enough not to listen to me and snuck out that evening to investigate by himself. Later that night he radioed in saying that he’d found something big and he’d be camping overnight there, followed by his coordinates roughly nine kilometres away! To this day I have no idea how he covered that much ground so quickly, but that’s Bakir for you. We set off early the next morning and by half past ten we arrived to find him sat in the shade of this large wing sticking out of the sand like a fence post. “I found your visual artifact, professor!” he said to me.

I recognized it as a Pre-Collapse aircraft immediately and a particularly old one at that, having been manufactured sometime around 90 BAC. It’s possible that the pilot crashed here while attempting to land near the petrol station, and the direction the craft is pointing supports this theory. What was most remarkable however, was that according to the trace carbon in the exhaust pipes and petrochemical in the engine, this craft had last flown sometime around 110 AAC! This is far beyond the timeframe where we had expected aviation to have ceased completely. As Prof. Nighthorse put in his Treatise on Mechanization following the Anthropocenic Industrial Collapse:

“[With] the collapse of manufacturing and distribution networks, the commonplace usage of complex machines which requires specialized components and large amounts of fuel immediately become untenable… [as] society revert[ed] to a form of localized subsistence, the ’cost’ of maintenance would have outweighed the gains in efficiency for any machine larger and more complex than a simple combustion engine, for which parts could be easily scavenged and quickly repaired.”

This site, then, should be an impossibility and yet there it was. We eventually excavated it enough to get inside and we found that the cabin had passenger seats in the front and a large flat area for cargo near the tail. Apart from that, no definitive clues as to who had flown this or why. The fact that it’s here at all, though, implies that someone (likely a pilot from before the collapse) decided that keeping this aircraft running was worth the time and effort somehow. So much so that they had passed that knowledge onto their children, and perhaps his grandchildren would have flown it if it hadn’t have crashed here.

It became something of an academic obsession of mine. I’ve spent the better part of my career so far chasing that airplane. Trying to figure out where it came from, where it was going, to find another like it, or even just a mention of some Post-Collapse air-freight service in an archive somewhere but there have been no strong leads as of yet. In truth, I don’t believe we’ll ever know for sure. Perhaps it was a one off flight; an old pilot taking to the sky one more time in a last hurrah for the world which seemed to have ended before their eyes. We’ll never know, but I don’t plan to stop looking any time soon.”

— Excerpt from Pawprints in The Sands of Time by Doctor William Swifft, 1106 AAC.