The Boeing 737 Air India Completely Forgot

Forgot one of those everyday things again? It happens to everyone; maybe you forgot your wallet, forgot to lock the front door, or forgot to charge your phone before you rushed out. These little slip-ups are universal, and the memory usually pops back into your head at the exact moment it can cause the most inconvenience.

And if ordinary people can slip up like that, imagine what happens inside massive companies juggling thousands of moving parts. Now picture this: not a missing wallet, not a misplaced bill. but an entire Boeing 737 just vanished from the checklist.

That’s exactly what unfolded in Kolkata. When the airport asked Air India to clear an old aircraft from a remote stretch of runway, the airline suddenly realised the Boeing 737 had been sitting there for nearly 13 years without anyone noticing. To make the whole thing even more surreal, Air India’s CEO, Campbell Wilson, later told employees that the organisation didn’t even have it on their radar. In other words, the plane wasn’t just forgotten; the company didn’t seem to remember it ever existed in the first place.

This was no ordinary plane—it had a long and eventful history. It first joined Indian Airlines back in September 1982 and spent the next 16 years flying passengers across the country. In 1998, it switched over to Alliance Air on a lease, only to return almost a decade later, in 2007, as a cargo aircraft for India Post. That same year, after Indian Airlines merged with Air India, the plane officially became part of Air India’s fleet.

In 2012, the aircraft ended up sitting idle at Kolkata airport, mostly ignored, as if tucked away and out of sight. During the years that followed, Air India went through major changes—the Tata Group took over, old teams were reorganised, and new systems were rolled out. Somewhere in all that reshuffling, the plane quietly disappeared from the company’s records.

Even the airport had forgotten about it. The plane was parked in a quiet corner, far from terminals and checklists, blending in like forgotten equipment. Over the years, staff changed and the area got repurposed. It wasn’t until an inspection for airport expansion that someone finally noticed it and asked, “Whose plane is this?” Once the airport raised the issue, Air India dug into its records and realised the plane wasn’t listed anywhere. The CEO’s note confirmed it: the airline had genuinely forgotten about the 43-year-old Boeing. The aircraft was then transported from Kolkata to Bengaluru on a massive trailer, nearly 1,900 km, where it will now train future aircraft engineers.