Air India Discovers Long-Lost Boeing 737-200 After 13 Years at Kolkata Airport

An Air India Boeing 737-200 (registration VT-EHH), unaccounted for since 2012, has been located in a disused area of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport in Kolkata, exposing significant deficiencies in the carrier’s historical asset-tracking and governance protocols during its period as a state-owned entity.

The 43-year-old aircraft had been withdrawn from service and parked at the airport in 2012. Over subsequent years, it was progressively omitted from critical records, including the fixed-asset register, depreciation schedules, insurance portfolios, and maintenance planning documents, effectively rendering it invisible within the airline’s administrative systems.

In an internal communication, Air India Chief Executive Officer Campbell Wilson attributed the oversight to repeated exclusions from asset inventories in the pre-privatisation era, resulting in the aircraft being entirely absent from the valuation and asset schedule transferred to Tata Group upon acquisition in 2022.

The aircraft came to light only recently when airport authorities in Kolkata initiated a clearance programme for dormant airframes. Following its rediscovery, VT-EHH has been relocated to the state of Rajasthan, where it is slated for repurposing as an aviation-themed restaurant — a fate previously met by another decommissioned Air India aircraft, VT-EGG.

Mr Wilson described the episode as symptomatic of “systemic documentation deficiencies” prevalent during the airline’s tenure under government ownership, while underscoring that comprehensive reforms implemented post-privatisation — including the modernisation of IT infrastructure and enhanced maintenance and asset-management protocols — have substantially mitigated the risk of recurrence.

The airline has not disclosed the identity of the purchaser or the transaction value.

The incident has prompted widespread astonishment within the global aviation community and raised serious questions regarding the robustness of oversight mechanisms at legacy state carriers, particularly the feasibility of a multi-billion-dollar asset vanishing from official records for more than a decade.