Tarmac Aerosave, a French company that specializes in aircraft maintenance, storage and recycling, has spent the past year selling salvaged parts from decommissioned planes through an online shop called Tarmac Legacy, according to La Dépêche du Midi. The store launched in July 2025 at Le Bourget, the airfield near Paris best known for hosting the biennial Paris Air Show, and now lists around 100 items pulled from aircraft that will never fly again.
Inside a hangar at the company's site in Tarbes, in southwestern France, where two large aircraft sit in storage, workers sort through portholes, doors, seats, signs, trolleys, teapots, intercoms, paddles, slides, engine blades and even gutted cockpits, all destined for the Tarmac Legacy catalogue.
Sébastien Lecarpentier, head of Tarmac Aerosave's dismantling unit, said that when an aircraft reaches the end of its life, the owner keeps ownership of its parts and generally recovers between 500 and 1,500 of them, depending on the aircraft and the client's needs. He said the owner does not take everything, and whatever is left is removed from aviation use and declared unusable. Some of those leftover parts, he said, had previously been used to equip crew training centres.
A 94% Recycling Rate
Tarmac Aerosave recycles 94% of the aircraft it dismantles at its Tarbes site, and the parts that could not previously be reused were dragging down that figure. Lecarpentier said that material used to be thrown away as waste that was often impossible to sell on, despite occasional new uses, such as a piece of fuselage turned into a fence. He described the shop as a marginal activity that answers demand from enthusiasts and fits the company's culture of recycling and giving objects a second life.
150 Orders, From a 10-Euro Ashtray to a Cockpit
In just over a year, Tarmac Legacy has taken more than 150 orders from customers around the world, along with inquiries about oversized projects, Lecarpentier said. The cheapest item in the catalogue, an ashtray, sells for 10 euros. At the other end of the range, an emptied cockpit can sell for between 10,000 and 20,000 euros, he said, and whole aircraft have been converted into unusual homes, restaurants and even a studio for an influencer. Portholes, trolleys, lighting fixtures and toilet signage are among the most requested items, he added.
Some buyers have taken on more ambitious projects, Lecarpentier said, including a camper van fitted with composite flooring salvaged from a plane and, at Strasbourg's Stade de la Meinau, home of the RC Strasbourg football club, 200 sections of Airbus A380 fuselage repurposed as louvred shutters around the stadium.
Pushing Further Into Upcycling
Alongside raw parts that are cleaned, polished and stripped of anything identifying the airline that once owned them, Tarmac Legacy is building out a line of upcycled products. Two employees work on the unit in Tarbes and another is based in Teruel, Spain, in addition to a project coordinator. Examples include an A380 porthole turned into a clock and a landing-gear hatch converted into a bottle rack.
Marion Courrèges, the company's communications manager, said the goal is for the Tarmac Legacy brand to become well known and to keep growing through customer requests and ideas from the two staff members running the unit, calling the potential for the business almost limitless. Lecarpentier said the company plans to approach the works councils of major aerospace firms as well as the Aeroscopia aviation museum in Blagnac about singular objects that could also be produced at a larger scale. He said Tarmac Aerosave has built in-house expertise to recondition, reuse and redirect these parts, but wants to push the upcycling side even further.
A Partnership With an Aviation Artist
To widen its range, the company has also turned to art, teaming up with Laurence B. Henry, an aviation painter based in Laloubère, near Tarbes, to create one-off pieces.
Wider Growth at Tarmac Aerosave
The launch of Tarmac Legacy comes amid broader expansion at Tarmac Aerosave. The company recently marked the arrival of its 2,000th aircraft at its Tarbes site, a milestone it described as a symbol of rapid growth in the sector.
Separately, an Airbus A380, the double-decker jumbo jet, that had been stored at the Tarbes facility for nearly five years is set to return to service, while Tarmac Aerosave has also opened what it describes as the world's largest metal-and-textile hangar, in Spain.
