Living inside a passenger jet sounds like some special circle of hell, but Bruce Campbell makes it look pretty cozy, as a video by Great Big Story documents.
Campbell, an electrical engineer, spends his days in a Boeing 727 that functioned as a Greek airliner in the 1960s. He purchased the retired aircraft in 1999, and keeps it parked in a forest clearing near Portland, Oregon. Over the decades, Campbell has gradually renovated the plane to make it into a kind of spacious studio apartment, recycling original parts and finding homey potential in the plane’s once-rigid spaces. The wings serve as a deck. The cockpit is a reading room. The lavatories, well, those are still lavatories. Campbell continues to restore and refine his home, according to his personal site, airplanehome.com.
Nutty? Sure. But there’s unmistakable wisdom in Campbell’s project.
“It’s a sealed pressure canister. It’s incredibly strong,” he says in the video. “It will last practically forever.”
Laura Bliss is a staff writer at CityLab, covering transportation and technology. She also authors MapLab, a biweekly newsletter about maps (subscribe here). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Los Angeles magazine, and beyond.
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