One of Michigan’s most enduring sagas in the Upper Peninsula — the grounding of a Russian cargo jet marooned near Marquette for 16 years — may soon come to an end after years of lawsuits, police investigations and feuding over ownership.
The tale that touches Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Pakistan and Texas and involves expired visas, an unpaid mechanic, multiple financiers, the local sheriff and the FBI may soon end with the plane flying again.
All thanks to wars in Gaza and Ukraine that a representative of the plane’s owner says have dramatically boosted the aircraft’s value to $50 million from $12 million.
“There’s been an uptick in activity, simply because of the ongoing things in the Gaza Strip and likewise with the war in Ukraine and Russia, so there’s companies out there that are investing and purchasing all kinds of air cargo airplanes,” Dwight Barnell, a broker who has maintained the plane through its multiple owners over the years, told Bridge Michigan.
The plane, a Russian Ilyushin IL-78 cargo plane built in Uzbekistan and sold out of Ukraine, landed at Marquette Sawyer Regional Airport in Gwinn on July 17, 2009, to refuel.
It never took off. Half of its crew was detained by immigration officials that night, including the pilot, and the local court ordered the plane grounded while at least six creditors both foreign and domestic fought over who should control the aircraft.
The whole case is “quite unusual,” said Cliff Maine, who has worked in aviation law for decades and is familiar with the plane. “And you need unusual characters.”
Barnell said the plane’s owners have for years spent about $1,000 a month storing the plane in Gwinn amid an ownership struggle.
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Now, the plane has a clean title and its current owner, Philadelphia consulting firm Meridican Inc., is readying it for sale. He said two to three entities have expressed interest in the aircraft.
The Ukrainian engineers needed to inspect the plane have been caught in the backlog of visa applicants since the weeks-long government shutdown that ended in mid-November.
Once those engineers inspect the plane, a sale can be finalized, and then it’ll take three to four months to get it ready for flight, Barnell said.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Barnell said. “We’re excited to get it off to its next chapter of life.”
If the plane flies again, it’ll cap a yearslong battle that snaked its way through state and federal courts and captured the attention of national news outlets and Marquette residents who called the plane “Boris the Tanker.”
“It’s something that’s well-known about … so I’m sure it’s something that people will know that it’s gone,” David Erhart, manager of the Marquette airport, told Bridge Michigan.
“To see it have new life is what we’d hope for for the aircraft owner.”
‘Cop Cars Coming Out of Everywhere’
The messy affair came to the Upper Peninsula when the phone rang at the Marquette County Sheriff’s Office at 11 a.m. July 17, 2009.
An attorney representing a Texas mechanic told a Marquette County deputy that a Russian plane had landed despite a Grayson County, Texas, judge’s order that the plane stay in Texas. The Texas mechanic had sued the plane’s owners over unpaid bills, according to police records Bridge Michigan obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
As well, the caller said, some of the plane’s crew were Ukrainians in the country on expired visas.
Barnell said that, when he and his crew disembarked in Gwinn, “all of a sudden, the whole airport lit up, cop cars coming out of everywhere.”
When police interviewed the pilot, he told them the crew had stopped in Marquette to refuel and was enroute to Iceland and eventually Pakistan.
Barnell told Bridge he had a lease on the plane at the time and was rightfully headed to Pakistan, where it would be used in military training. He said nobody told him the mechanic hadn’t been paid. They’d landed in Gwinn to buy $100,000 worth of fuel and to hand paperwork to US Customs that would allow the plane to leave the country.