Air India forgets Boeing 737 for 13 years now faces 1 crore parking bill

A Boeing 737, a 43-year-old stalwart, has been lying in rust at the Kolkata Airport for 13 years. It seems Air India forgot that the aircraft was still in the books. It has a massive parking bill now, approximately 1 crore. The aircraft registered as VT-EHH was decommissioned in 2012, but was left in the taxiway of Kolkata Airport. On November 14, it was cleared from the airport, and it is now in Bengaluru, where it will be used to train maintenance engineers.

VT- EHH career-

The aircraft was first inducted into service in 1982. It initially flew for Indian Airlines for a few years, then it was leased to Alliance Air from 1998. It then returned to cargo operations in 2007 and was transferred following the Indian Airlines and Air India merger. Since then, it has served for India Post until being decommissioned in 2012.

How did Air India forget about its Boeing 737

This can be considered an institutional amnesia due to bureaucracy. The company's CEO, Campbell Wilson, noted that the company had no memory of the VT-EHH. In an internal memo, he said, Disposal of an old aircraft is not unusual.” But they had no record of it. The main culprit is attributed to the acquisition of Air India by the Tata group in 2022. However, before that, during the 2007 merger between Air India and Indian Airlines to form the National Aviation Company of India Limited (NACIL), later renamed Air India, all the assets were consolidated. Following that period and the decommissioning, the aircraft was lost in the internal records. This further highlights the bureaucracy and mismanagement of resources in state-owned enterprises. Kolkata airport has recently taken on the task of clearing such aircraft. It has unintentionally become the scrapyard of decommissioned aircraft. In the last 5 years, the airport have removed 14 such "ownerless" or decommissioned aircraft to free up much-needed parking space in the tarmac.