Airport authorities have placed an ad in a newspaper seeking the unknown owner of three Boeing 747 planes left abandoned on the tarmac of Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA)
The planes could be sold or destroyed if they fail to be claimed within 14 days, Malaysia Airports, the company managing the country's airports, warned in an ad placed in The Star and Sin Chew Daily newspapers.
The unclaimed Boeing 747-200Fs could be sold to recover the charges owed by the owner, which includes parking and landing fees among other charges, under the country's Civil Aviation Act of 1969, the company said in a statement today.
The owner could also be subject to charges by Malaysia Airports, according to the notice, though no exact amount is specified, according to The Star.
The "off-white" coloured aircraft with a registration code of TF-ARM, and two white planes with the codes TF-ARN and TF-ARH, respectively, belong to Air Atlanta Icelandic, according to their codes. But they were sold by the Icelandic firm in 2008 and have remained at KLIA for more than a year, Zainol Mohd Isa, the general manager for Malayasia Airports, told CNN.
The airport has made previous attempts to contact the last known owners, who were described to be "international" and not Malayasian, of the two passenger aircraft and one cargo plane, according to the manager.
"I don't know why they are not responding. There could be many reasons. Sometimes it could be because they have no money to continue operations," he said.
View image | gettyimages.comAs unusual as the latest attempt to find the owners might seem, "this step is a common process undertaken by airport operators all over the world when faced with such a situation," according to the company.
"The giving of such notice by way of advertisement is a common and reasonable step in the process of debt recovery especially in cases where the company concerned has ceased operations and is a foreign entity whereby exhaustive steps undertaken to find a contact person have not been successful," the company said in its statement.
This is also not the first instance of unclaimed aircraft at KLIA. The airport has seen several other abandoned planes, mostly smaller aircraft, in the last 10 years, including one in the Nineties which was eventually made into a restaurant in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, the manager said.
KLIA is the airport from where the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 took off before it went missing in March 2014.
The Telegraph, London
