From in-flight meals on the ground to a luxury flight of fancy, Bali’s four jetliner conversions

Retired passenger jets have found new lives on the Indonesian holiday island – as a restaurant, a nightclub feature and soon, a cafe with a flight simulator

Perhaps the most eye-catching is a Russian entrepreneur’s Boeing 737 on a cliff top, soon to be an exclusive leather-lined villa with a sun terrace on a wing

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A retired Boeing 737 on a cilff top in Bali which Russian entrepreneur Felix Demin intends to turn into luxury accommodation. It is one of four retired airliners on the Indonesian holiday island. Photo: Felix Demin

Published: 11:15am, 6 Mar 2022

From a fine-dining restaurant in India with private booths and an interior inspired by the Maharaja Express luxury train, to a hotel near Stockholm Airport in Sweden with guest rooms in the cockpit, engine bays and wheelhouse room, converting passenger jets into hospitality venues is an almost fail-safe formula for attracting tourists.

“Many people still hold on to images of the so-called ‘golden age’ of commercial aviation in the 1960s when planes were not crowded, people dressed to fly, airlines focused on service, there was no airport security and just the act of flying commercial made people feel elite,” says Janet Bednarek, a professor of history at the University of Dayton in the United States who teaches aviation history.

“And for many, there is still a fascination, even romance, with aeroplanes. Some are still a little amazed that these giant aluminium structures can actually get off the ground.”

A tropical backwater that was transformed into one the world’s most popular islands following the upgrade of a Dutch military airfield into an international airport in the 1960s, Bali in Indonesia may just have a larger concentration of repurposed jetliners than any other urban area in the world: four within a 50km radius.

A McDonnell Douglas DC 10 tail section at Gate 88 Mall on the island of Bali in Indonesia. Photo: Ian Neubauer

Kerobokan is on the western fringe of the provincial capital, Denpasar. Here, at a busy crossroads, on the rooftop of Gate 88 Mall, is the monstrous tail section of a McDonnell Douglas DC 10 with parts of the horizontal stabilisers – the smaller wings at the rear – protruding three storeys above a steady stream of cars and motorbikes.