Lufthansa sent 6 Boeing 747-400s to the Twente airport in the Netherlands. It’s a short flight from Frankfurt, has no commercial service, and an 8000 foot runway. It seemed like the perfect place to store them, and there’s even a company that can de-commission planes on site.

Now it turns out that Lufthansa wants to move the planes to scrap them elsewhere but the government stood in the way. You can land at the airport, but you cannot ever leave. The aviation authority updated the airport’s permits so that takeoffs of planes this large aren’t allowed. Now “wide-body aircraft can land at Twente Airport, but only for dismantling.”

Deze prachtige foto’s zijn speciaal voor @twenteairport gemaakt door Ronald Spanjers! pic.twitter.com/9cZqUQ5RRK

— Twente Airport (@twenteairport) August 12, 2020

The government says the airport lacks “the correct safety certificate” and One Mile at a Time says “worst case scenario this will be done at the airport” except that seems to be ruse to begin with, keep the planes on the ground to preserve business for the local operator.

There’s no ‘security issue’ with a 747 taking off from the airport, which was allowed until Lufthansa brought theirs there to store. In tactics one associates more with New Jersey than The Netherlands, Lufthansa doesn’t want to do dismantling work with the on-site company, so the government wouldn’t let them leave.

Once the situation received public scrutiny it became a mere paperwork issue, “the first aircraft can take off in the short term. Two others will leave before the end of the year. The last three are scheduled to leave Twente Airport by the end of June 2021.”