Kolkata Airport has finally bid goodbye to a Boeing 737-200 aircraft that lay abandoned at its premises for more than 13 years! Forgotten by Air India, the aircraft stood at Kolkata Airport since 2012 and was discovered earlier this month by the airline.
The 43-year-old Boeing aircraft was finally sold by Air India earlier this month. The aircraft was finally rolled out of Kolkata airport premises on November 14. Air India paid over Rs 1 crore to Calcutta airport as cumulative “charges” for the Boeing’s 13-year stay, as per officials.
“The directorate-general of civil aviation deregistered the aircraft in 2013. We wrote several letters to Air India to take the aircraft away. Recently, Air India got in touch with us,” a senior official at Kolkata airport said.
History of the Boeing aircraft
The aircraft had been delivered to the erstwhile Indian Airlines in September 1982 and later leased by Alliance Air in February 1998. It was returned to Indian Airlines as a cargo plane in July 2007. In August 2007, the aircraft came into Air India’s possession when Indian Airlines was merged with it. It was finally decommissioned in 2012 and remained forgotten ever since.
The Boeing — converted into a cargo plane in 2007 and deregistered in 2013 — was first kept in a hangar at Calcutta airport. Eventually, it was parked on a patch of earth beside the tarmac at the airport’s southeastern corner, without a roof over its head.
Finally transported to Bengaluru
Campbell Wilson, Air India CEO and managing director, wrote an internal message about the aircraft on November 21, “Dear colleagues, last week, we completed the sale and transfer of a B737-200 aircraft (VT-EHH), which had been grounded since 2012. Though disposal of an old aircraft is not unusual, this one is — for it’s an aircraft that we didn’t even know we owned until recently!”
“Over time, it was lost from memory and only came to light when our friends at Kolkata Airport informed us of its presence in a (very) remote parking bay and asked us to remove it! After verifying that it was indeed ours, we’ve now done so — and in so doing removed another old cobweb from our closet!” he further wrote.
The aircraft was finally transported on a tractor-trailer to Bengaluru, where it will now be used to train maintenance engineers. This is the 14th defunct aircraft cleared from Kolkata airport in the past five years, and the space it occupied will soon house one of two new hangars proposed at the facility.
Air India has so far disposed of 39 obsolete aircraft and associated engines across multiple fleets (B747, A319, A321, B737). The last one to go was a B744, long parked at Mumbai airport.
Meanwhile, two more “unclaimed” aircraft — ATR-72s belonging to Alliance Air — are lying at Kolkata airport for the past five years or so.
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