White Plane at Bratislava

According to news from Slovakia, the plane on the picture below has been sitting on the apron at Bratislava international airport for quite some time (for weeks according to one of the commercial TV stations in Slovakia and published by the Hungarian News Agency – MTI as well). As we can see on this picture, the plane has no livery painted, only a US registration number, even that painted with hard-to-see grey color on the white aircraft body. Just by doing a little research on the internet and looking for this registration number in search engines, we can see the following “unfolding story” of the aircraft itself:

• the plane used to be operated by Continental Airlines until around late 2005,
• 2006 January, it began appearing at Frankfurt International Airport in Germany, with still blue tail, but without the Continental logo, it also showed up at least once in Luxembourg (according to Airframes.org it was delivered to Vision Air on 2006-01-09)
• 2006 February and March, more spotting in Frankfurt,
• 2006 May already saw the aircraft with a white tail, showing up in Budapest, Hungary, some pictures providing such information that it was to fly to Washington with a stop in Iceland,
• 2006 September, it is spotted in Budapest, Hungary again,
• 2007 July already sees the aircraft flying out of Bratislava – where it is still stationed in March 2008, according to the reports spreading today around the internet.

Here is the public information about ownership and history of the aircraft, which first flew in 1985. It’s interesting that one article on the internet mentions this same plane flying together with another, which is claimed to be inolved in CIA operations.

Photo: Andras Kisgergely. More photos from this photographer here. 

The above mentioned reports spreading in the news try to find the reason, why this plane may be sitting on the apron at the International Airport of the Slovakian capital, which is a member of the European Union since 2004. According to the Slovakian press, the plane hasn’t flown in the last few weeks, but the engine is started up everyday as a check-up. They also claim that only one person (whose citizenship is supposedly US) has access to this aircraft. If it’s true that they run the engine everyday for a few minutes, it proves the theory suggested by the reports that this is a back-up plane for some sort of operations. What kind of operations require such a back-up plane to be always ready to fly? The same reports also suggest that it may be supporting secret CIA missions and operations, where the CIA still transports whatever and whoever they wish through European Air Space, what more, uses a European Union airport as a supporting base.

We as an airline blog do not wish to be involved in the guessing of what this airplane does and why it is where it is, we’ll leave this for the regular media. For us it was just interesting to hear that there’s an “unregistered” plane at Bratislava – which as you can see above is not “unregistered”, it has an official owner and is registered in the Unites States of America and has a public history of flying around different airports.

by balint01