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Key Points
Air India lost track of its 'Baby Boeing' for 12 years, despite the plane racking up crores worth of parking charges.
The plane, nicknamed 'Baby Boeing', was a cargo plane first flown by Indian Airlines, Alliance Air, and then India Post, before being acquired by Air India.
It was lost by the company during its messy 2022 takeover by the Tata Group and has now been sold, dismantled, and transported to Bengaluru for engineering practice.
For twelve long years, a Boeing 737-200 quietly occupied a parking bay at Kolkata’s airport. The engines were intact, the registration VT-EHH was visible, and the birds had built a thriving real estate empire on its wings. The only people who did not seem to notice were the owners.
Air India, it turned out, had forgotten the plane existed.
The 43 year old aircraft, nicknamed Baby Boeing, was built in 1982 and once flown by Indian Airlines, Alliance Air, and later on cargo and India Post routes. It was officially grounded in 2012. It was never deregistered, never scrapped, and never removed. Instead, it slipped out of internal databases during the 2022 takeover by the Tata Group. A ₹100 crore asset disappeared on paper while sitting in plain sight.
Kolkata airport kept sending parking bills for years, which piled into crores. But Air India’s system showed no such aircraft. The invoices were ignored, disputed, or politely filed into the void.
The mystery unravelled only in mid 2025, when airport authorities demanded its removal to make space for a new hangar. When officials pointed at the aircraft, Air India executives reportedly replied, “Which aircraft?”
A frantic dive into old logbooks finally exposed the embarrassing truth. Air India CEO Campbell Wilson, in an internal communication, called it “highly unusual” and admitted the airline had “lost complete track” of the jet.
On November 14, 2025, engineers began dismantling the 737: wings, tail, engines, and finally the fuselage, which was cut into three parts. Escorted by police, the sections travelled 1,600 km along NH-16 and NH-48, carefully avoiding low bridges that once trapped another Air India 737 under a Durgapur overpass in 2019. The aircraft is now a full scale training mock up, after being sold to an Air India Engineering Services Ltd. (AIESL) facility in Bengaluru.
This is not the first time an Air India aircraft has gone missing from memory. At least four others have been moved out of Kolkata after years of neglect. But VT-EHH will likely remain the most infamous example of how an entire jet can vanish from spreadsheets while never moving an inch on the tarmac.
Sometimes, the real ghosts of aviation never leave the ground. [Rh]
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