Some people misplace their car keys or an AirPod, but Air India went one step further and somehow misplaced a Boeing 737-200.

We’d love to have been in the room during an Air India management call when somebody said: “Hold on, where’s the plane?”

Now they’ve finally sold the aircraft.

But the amount they had to pay to recover it was astronomical.

Click the star icon next to supercarblondie.com in Google Search to stay ahead of the curve on the latest and greatest supercars, hypercars, and ground-breaking technology

This is the ‘parent’ of an aircraft most of us have used before

The Boeing 737-200 is a modified version of the original 737.

The 737 was first introduced in 1968, with Lufthansa, and it has since evolved into a family of aircraft that practically every airline in the world has used.

Interestingly, the 737-200 – a version unveiled 50-plus years ago – is still in service.

For instance, the Indonesian Air Force, Indian Air Force, and Peruvian Air Force all use Boeing 737-200s.

To be clear, only lesser-known airlines such as Air Inuit and Buffalo Airways use it as a passenger plane.

This is why Air India forgot about this plane

Air India had completely forgotten about this airplane, and they only found out about it when Kolkata Airport called them and asked them to remove the plane.

The problem is that it then took forever for Air India to verify this was actually their jet, because it had originally been registered before the merger with Indian Airlines, a state-owned company.

That’s the key element of this story.

The first owner, Indian Airlines, was a state-owned airline, which later merged with Air India, which is a privately owned company.

With a private company, you know what you have because you’re paying for it, but with a public airline, it’s everybody’s money, which is the same as saying that’s nobody’s money.

So when the merger happened, records of this Boeing got lost in the maze, and Air India only found out about it when they were asked to pay 10 million Indian Rupees – around $120,000 – to recover it.

The exact sale price of the aircraft has not been publicly disclosed, but given the state (and age) of the plane, whatever it was, it likely barely covered the massive parking bill.

DISCOVER SBX CARS:

The global premium car auction platform powered by Supercar Blondie