According to official data, More than 80 million passengers pass through airports such as the Adolfo Suárez Madrid – Barajas airport each year, while more than 19 million travelers pass through the Josep Tarradellas Barcelona – El Prat airport each year. With that volume of passengers, it’s not strange for people to lose things. The undersigned lost a jacket he loved forgotten at the Berlin airport.
However, at least usually someone loses a 70 meter object long and 200 tons in weight, like those weighed by the three Boeing 747s that someone forgot in 2015 at the Kuala Lumpur airport (Malaysia).
The three forgotten Boeings
For more than a year, these giants of more than 70 meters long, they remained parked in a corner of the international airport in the Malaysian capital as if they were a simple lost object, accumulating fees and attracting the attention of the ground teams who saw them every day without anyone taking responsibility for them.
Over time, that It stopped being just a curious anecdote among the runway operators and became a real administrative problem for the airport management through which more than 70 million passengers pass through each year.
The airport space management company was obliged to reserve that space for the three aircraft, assume their tariff costs and try to clarify who was responsible for those three. Boeing 747‑200two configured for passengers and one for cargo.
The most striking thing about the case is that they were not small planes within the reach of any user with a flight license, but rather they were three Boeing 747‑200which in its passenger version It can exceed 400 seats and reached a price of about 39 million dollars in the early 1980s.
Even so, these three units, identified with the registration plates TF-ARM, TF-ARN and TF-ARH, were immobilized for more than a year and without anagrams or marks that related them to any of the companies that usually operated at that airport.
Whose planes are these?
Tired of accumulating debt and dust in equal measure, Kuala Lumpur airport authorities set out to find the planes’ owners. According to pointed Bloomberg, the first information indicated that one of the aircraft had carried out cargo tasks for Malaysia Airlines, which had rented it to the Icelandic Air Atlanta Icelandic.
Given the impossibility of locating a clear owner through the usual means, the airport administration decided to resort to a method as simple as it is forceful: post an ad in the local newspaper Star Newspaper to ask the “missing” owner of the planes to come by the airport to pick them up.
The message of the advertisement was clear: “If you do not collect the aircraft within 14 days from the date of this notice, we reserve the right to sell or otherwise dispose of the aircraft in accordance with the Civil Aviation Regulations 1996 and use the money raised to offset any expenses and debts owed to us under those regulations,” stated the published notice.
As and how I collected Guardianthe Kuala Lumpur authorities had decided to take action to get rid of the three aircraft, and were preparing the ground to sell them to the highest bidder. “We have been in communication with the supposed owner, but he has not responded to us to remove the aircraft. That is why we are carrying out this process to legalize any action we want to take,” Mohd Isa, the contact person who appeared in the announcement, told the British newspaper Zainol.
The case took a turn when the Swift Air Cargo company, a freight transport company, stated that those planes were theirs and that they had not “forgotten” them, but rather that they were in the middle of a purchase operation from a Hong Kong company that had not yet been resolved.
From that moment on, what seemed like a simple case of inattention turned into a dispute over who was really the legal owner and who should be responsible for their particular “parking ticket.”
Boeings rose to fame
It is not usual for three aircraft the size of these Boeing 747s to be “forgotten” on the runway of an international airport, which is why the three aircraft were made famous all over the world.
Since finally It was not possible to clarify who the real owner was.the airport carried out its threat and sold the devices to the highest bidder. According to published LuxuryLaunchesNowadays, airplanes have a very different use than that for which they were designed.
One of them, the TF‑ARMwas transferred to Nanchang, in China, where it ended up becoming a valuable setting for training practices for students of the Jiangxi Aviation Technical and Vocational School.
The TF-ARN has become a tourist curiosity in northern Dinghai District in Zhoushan
He TF-RNA traveled to Zhoushan, in China’s Zhejiang province, and was transformed into a leisure attraction, while the TF‑ARH He didn’t go too far from that airport. It was taken to the Freeport A’Famosa Outlet shopping complex in Malacca (Malaysia), where it was converted into a curious space which combines a cafeteria, a shopping area under the name “Coach Airways”.
The third Boeing 747 is a cafeteria next to a shopping center in Malacca (Malaysia)
In this way, the three jumbo jets that for more than a year remained forgotten at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, adding unpaid fees of several million, ended up finding a second life as a tourist attraction, practical classroom and commercial experience, far from the initial idea that they would end up reduced to scrap metal.
Image | Flickr (Slices of Light)
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