Kolkata Airport has seen monsoon storms, diverted flights, and the occasional celebrity touchdown — but perhaps nothing as bizarre as a full-sized Boeing 737 sunbathing on the tarmac for 13 uninterrupted years, unnoticed and unloved.
Since 2012, the ageing aircraft has sat quietly under the open sky, gathering dust, moss, and enough curiosity to fuel airport gossip for a decade. Onlookers wondered if it was evidence for a secret project, a retired museum piece, or simply an accident no one dared to correct. The truth, however, is far stranger: Air India forgot it existed.
The vintage Boeing 737-200 — 43-years-old and long past its glamorous years — had been repurposed as a cargo jet from 2007. But when that permit expired in 2012, the aircraft wasn’t flown, fixed, or sold. It was simply parked. And then, astonishingly, erased from collective memory.
For years, the plane stood abandoned in a remote corner of the airport, so inconspicuous that it didn’t even make it into paperwork. No maintenance logs. No asset sheets. No financial reports. It was as though the aircraft had slipped into an alternate dimension where bureaucracy cannot reach.
The oversight only came to light when Kolkata Airport officials recently contacted Air India asking if they could remove the colossal piece of aviation “furniture” blocking their bay. To Air India’s surprise, horror, and mild embarrassment, the forgotten relic was indeed theirs.
Air India CEO Campbell Wilson summed up the situation in an email to staff: They hadn’t just misplaced a file or delayed a repair — they had misplaced an entire aircraft. He wrote mentioning that Air India had no idea about the ownership of the aircraft.
Over the years, the aircraft had been removed from service for use by the Indian Postal Department and then quietly dropped from several official documents. As management changed, reporting structures shifted, and privatisation approached, the Boeing slowly slipped into obscurity like a mythical creature people vaguely remember hearing about.
After more than a decade of sun damage and official neglect, the plane has finally found a purpose. A Bengaluru-based flight training institute has snapped it up — reportedly at a bargain-basement price — and will be transporting it to Karnataka by road.
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Meanwhile, Kolkata Airport had to be paid nearly Rs 1 crore in rent by Air India for the pleasure of hosting this unintended exhibit for 13 years. And this isn’t the end of the mystery scrapyard saga. Two smaller Alliance Air ATR-72 aircraft have also been lounging at the airport for the past five years, equally ignored and unaddressed.
Aviation experts claim that this incident, hilarious as it sounds, is emblematic of the deeper mismanagement that once pushed Air India into colossal losses — losses so severe that the airline had to be sold to the Tata Group, though the old brand name still flies.
This Boeing, quietly rusting in Kolkata’s sun and rain, became the perfect metaphor for an organisation once drowning in neglected assets and forgotten records. It can no longer take to the skies, but the lost-and-found Boeing is finally heading out of Kolkata, not roaring through clouds but trundling down highways on trailers.
For an aircraft that died of bureaucratic amnesia, at least it gets a dramatic last journey.
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