‘Attention please, will the owner of three B747s please return to information counter to reclaim your misplaced freighters. Thank you.’
We really don’t know where to begin on this little news item that seems to be so curiously absurd that even the mainstream media outlets around the world picked up the story.
In case you somehow managed to miss it, Malaysia Airports Holdings Berhad (MAHB) took out a full-page classified advertisement in Malaysia’s Th e Star newspaper asking for the “untraceable” owner to collect three B747-200F aircraft within 14 days or risk seeing them being sold or demolished to pay unpaid parking fees.
Now we know the air cargo market is been pretty flat of late, but we didn’t realise it had gotten so bad that companies would just park and abandon their excess maindeck capacity! At first, the Belly Ache crew was speculating it was actually Singapore Airlines undertaking a little covert capacity reduction.
The Singapore carrier, once a powerhouse in the air cargo sector, seems to have developed a bit of freighter allergy and so we thought may they’ve decided to whittle their already diminished freighter fleet by another two or three by parking and ‘doing a runner’ (as the Aussies say) – after all, that’s what neighbours are for!
But, it quickly appeared that was an erroneous conclusion on our part, as shortly after the advertisement came out a company rather bizarrely named, Splunk n’ Dash (henceforth known as Splunk), crept out of the woodwork to lay claim to the three, rather worn-looking -200Fs.
Expressing incredulity that the MAWB would so hastily sell off the three aircraft, the folks over at Splunk claimed they are now the rightful owners of the trio of jumbos which have been parked at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) since mid-2010.
Unfortunately for Splunk a bit of clear air turbulence has struck. In short, the MAWB doesn’t believe Splunk n’ Dash!
And really can you blame them!?! The plot thickens! Media reports identifi ed the owner back in 2010 as leasing company Air Atlanta Icelandic (AAI) – who subsequently deregistered the aircraft and dissolved responsibility for them when ownership was transferred to China-based Shaanxi Sunshine Cargo. Since then, Splunk, which is apparently in the (very wise) process of renaming itself Swift Cargo (whose chief executive by the way, goes by the name Blue Peterson), has come out to state that the actual owner was not AAI but Flugvik EHF, an Icelandic company in Reykjavik who leased them through various entities to AirAtlanta Icelandic.
The erstwhile Splunk then goes on at great length on its website (http://swiftaircargo.com/Newsroom.html) to explain how it came to own the three aircraft and that in does indeed hold all relevant paperwork proving it owns the aircraft. To make an incredibly convoluted story short, the three aircraft were purchased by Splunk on 8 June 2015 via an unnamed “Hong Kong entity”.
Wrapping up its long explanation on its website, Splunk then says it looks forward to “private” discussions with the MAWB, before rather bizarrely (yes there is a theme developing here) concluding with the following paragraph: “Malaysia is a wonderful warm country, a land of opportunity, especially in cargo and SWIFT is looking forward to working with MASSB (MAHB) in creating the regional cargo hub for ASEAN.” Ahhh, ok.
And if that wasn’t enough, the bizarre factor got an extra push with the final line of its online news release: “Yuna’s song succinctly portrays the beauty of Malaysia, truly Asia”. And yes indeed, almost unbelievably (it is beginning to get tough to be surprised!) it’s a link to a rather saccharin song on YouTube! It just doesn’t get weirder than this we think, but who knows, stay tuned for the next chapter in this saga!
