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Next time you are flying, look around your seat. Can you imagine the row of seats transforming into tables in a fine dining restaurant? Or, a bedroom suite coming in place of the business class? Well, some enterprising people did; and in the process have turned old and retired aircraft, which are otherwise dismantled and sold as scrap, into cash making ventures.

One of them is Jasdeep Singh Bindra. Along with three partners, Bindra bought scrapped parts of an A-320 aircraft, put them in four trucks and transported them to Ludhiana where they re-did the interiors. Today the A-320 aircraft is living a second life in the form of a six-month-old vegetarian restaurant, Hawai Adda (airport in Hindi) with 65 covers. “The novelty value of eating in an aircraft restaurant and the quality of our food has made Hawai Adda popular among the people in Ludhiana,” says Bindra.

Sometimes it’s just about passion. Former cricketer Sandeep Patil made a bar in an old aircraft and parked it in his house in Mumbai.

His son and Marathi film star Chirag says, “That aircraft was every kid’s dream. It could do everything but fly. You pressed some buttons and the sounds and lights came on. It was actually like riding a plane. It was a different kind of experience. It was a great thing to boast about in school.”

Patil got the two-seater Commander 12 aircraft in the 1980’s. He revamped and refurbished the aircraft by removing the engine and put it on the terrace of his ancestral property in Dadar Shivaji Park where the family stayed. The area that had the engine was converted into a bar.

However, the plane had to be dismounted as it collapsed during a Mumbai monsoon and was left hanging from the balcony. It was dismounted and sold to a hotel in the city.

Now Chirag has purchased a plane model, which he saw being used in the Film City for a shoot. He has kept it in his farmhouse in Panvel.

In comparison, a jumbo jet Boeing 747 aircraft is more resilient. And that’s one of the reasons that it was converted into a hotel, aptly named Jumbo Stay at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport, and that is where it has been since 2009.

The aircraft has a chequered past. A de-commissioned model 747-200 jumbo jet built in 1976, it was last operated by Transjet, a Swedish airline that went bankrupt in 2002. It was originally built for Singapore Airlines and later served with Pan Am.

In January 2008, the aircraft was moved to a construction site where the first phase of the conversion begun with the dismantling of the old interiors and getting a new coat of paint and interiors for the rooms. The plane’s 450 seats were taken out and it was sanitised in its entirety.

In the summer of 2008, the plane was towed to its final destination. It was placed at the entrance to Arlanda, on a concrete foundation with the landing gear secured in two steel cradles. The different room categories on the jumbo can accommodate one to three adults in comfort as well as a quad dormitory bed option.

Some aircraft go through multiple reincarnations. Like the Soviet-made Ilyushin II-18, which is now a luxury accommodation for two.

“Only the cockpit is still original. The rest of the plane was stripped and rebuilt. When I bought the aircraft is was used as a restaurant in Germany,’’ says Ben Thijssen who paid €25,000 for the aircraft to bring it to Netherlands.

Ben got the idea after he and his wife stayed in a train converted into a hotel. “At that time there were no similar airplane hotels,” said Ben in an email interview. Ben wanted his hotel to be unique so he spent seven years to find a suitable airplane, a location and getting requisite permissions.

The complete aircraft today is one suite meant for two guests and most of the people visiting are there to celebrate something — a wedding anniversary or a surprise gift at an airport (Teuge International Airport). Ben claims his clients come from around the globe adding that he is not sure whether an Indian family has stayed there as they do not “keep all guest data.”

The hotel has a jacuzzi, a separate shower, infra-red sauna, mini bar, three flat screen televisions, a blu-ray DVD player with a collection of DVDs, a pantry with an oven/microwave, coffee and tea maker, free wireless internet and air conditioning. Tariff? Starts from €365 for two, per night.

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