We’ve all misplaced sunglasses, a single sock, or even a wallet. One driver once forgot where he’d parked his car for weeks. But losing an entire airplane? That’s next level.

Air India CEO Campbell Wilson joked that his airline had “removed another old cobweb from our closet.” In a now-viral internal message to staff, he explained, “Though disposal of an old aircraft is not unusual, this one is – for it’s an aircraft that we didn’t even know we owned until recently!”

This wasn’t some pint-sized Piper Cub. The aircraft in question was a Boeing 737-200 jetliner built between 1967 and 1988. It stretched roughly 100 feet long. Wilson added, “Over time, it was lost from memory and only came to light when our friends at Kolkata airport informed us of its presence in a (very) remote parking bay and asked us to remove it!”

How a 100-foot plane vanished without so much as a jet trail

So how do you lose a commercial jetliner? Air India originally bought the aircraft as a passenger plane. It later converted it into a freighter and leased it to India Post. Over decades of mergers and internal reshuffling, the paperwork followed a different path than the plane.

The aircraft was grounded in 2012 and parked in a remote bay at Kolkata Airport. The airline later admitted it was “repeatedly left out of internal records.” During that time, it quietly accumulated what amounted to a stack of parking tickets.

Over the past five years, Kolkata Airport has cleared out five abandoned aircraft. Eventually, officials contacted Air India directly. The airline confirmed the aircraft belonged to it and sold it for use as a training platform for technicians. Airport officials plan to use the newly freed space to build two hangars.

Air India has paid roughly $110,000, or 10 million rupees, in storage fees and penalties.