You may be familiar with this from your own apartment building or from the train station in your place of residence: three times as many bicycles are pounding around there as people live in the house or travel on the ICE or commute to the office on the S-Bahn. The roadworthiness of some of these bikes can be improved, and every now and then the impression solidifies that the owners no longer lay claim to their bikes: the tires flat, the chain rusted, the saddle stolen, they have been leaning ailing for year and day Bicycle stand or on the house wall. Until the house or city administration takes care of the matter and disposed of the scrap metal.
The Kenyan airport authority faces a similar problem. The only difference is that you don’t just quickly load passenger planes onto a trailer and drive them to the local recycling center. There are no fewer than 73 machines standing around at the airports of the East African country, which no one has used or waited for for a long time. And for what is not necessary with bicycles, but definitely with airplanes, nobody pays the parking fees anymore. Does one have to imagine it as something like in road traffic, with parking attendants patrolling the tarmac and checking whether a parking ticket is on the dashboard of the cockpit?
Be that as it may, the Kenya Airports Authority has qualified the 73 aircraft as abandoned and plans to auction them off in the coming weeks. The hurdles for prospective buyers are low: those who want to participate in the auction have to deposit $ 900 – just the equivalent of an upscale mid-range bike. The entry-level bids are also extremely low: a Cessna is called for less than $ 100, an Antonov, that classic Russian-made transport aircraft, for $ 1,300, and bids start at $ 3,700 for various Boeing aircraft.
This section recently reported on how the inventory of the Hotel Intercontinental in Frankfurt is being auctioned. Now the auction in Kenya. If you want, you can currently build a retro-chic tourism empire for little money. But it is important to act quickly: The aircraft, some of which are somewhat battered, can still be inspected by the middle of next week. In the case of the auction itself, the following applies: bought as seen, complaints excluded. And the machines then have to be picked up within two weeks.
If you want to buy empty the Frankfurt Interconti on a large scale, you should look for the Antonov in Nairobi – the gravel bike among transport aircraft, so to speak.