And finally…new in lost property: three jumbo jets

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.

“If you fail to collect the aircraft within 14 days of the date of this notice, we reserve the right to sell or otherwise dispose of the aircraft pursuant to the Civil Aviation Regulations 1996 and use the money raised to set off any expenses and debt due to us under the said Regulations,” the notice said.

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.

“We placed out the advertisements because we want to remove ambiguity over ownership of the planes,” Zainol Mohamad Isa Zainol, the airport’s general manager, told Malaysia’s Starnewspaper. “We want the owners to step forward and we want the planes to be out of our airport bay.”

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.

At least two of them were leased by the cargo arm of Malaysia Airlines, the troubled national carrier which has lost two of its passenger planes in the past two years - one to a suspected Russian missile attack over Ukraine, and the other, MH370, in a still unexplained disappearance.

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.

As 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 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.