At ten past seven on the evening of 20 September 2026, a friend in Fertilia, right beside Alghero airport in Sardinia, photographed a Boeing 737-700 coming over low with its gear down, lit gold by the last of the sun. The titles said AEROITALIA. The tail was painted green, white and red. And just ahead of the tail, the registration read 9H-SIL.

That combination is worth unpicking, because almost nothing about it is what you would guess.

A jet that was meant to be finished

9H-SIL is a Boeing 737-7K5, serial number 35150. It was delivered new to the Belgian airline Jetairfly in March 2009 as OO-JAR, and it spent the next sixteen years flying holidaymakers for what became TUI fly Belgium.

On 8 December 2025 TUI retired it. It was the last 737-700 in the whole TUI Group, which has standardised its short- and medium-haul fleet on the larger 737-800 and the 737 MAX 8. Belgian aviation press reported at the time that the jet would be scrapped.

It was not. By March 2026 it had been repainted, re-registered and handed to the Italian airline Aeroitalia. It was the first aircraft to wear the airline's new livery, and it flew its first service for them on 16 March 2026, from Rome Fiumicino to Cagliari as flight XZ2335.

Six months after that, it was the aircraft in my friend's photograph.

An Italian airline with Maltese number plates

The part that surprises most people is the registration. Every civil aircraft carries a nationality prefix: G for the United Kingdom, EI for Ireland, I for Italy. 9H is Malta.

Aeroitalia holds its operating certificate from Italy's civil aviation authority, ENAC, but its own aircraft are on the Maltese register. That is entirely legal. EU rules on air services allow an airline to register its aircraft either in its own national register or elsewhere within the Community.

Plenty of airlines take up that option. Malta's transport minister said in October 2024 that the register had grown from 174 aircraft to just over 900 in ten years. Ryanair's Malta Air is one of the biggest users. Earlier this month the radar on my desk showed a Malta Air 737-800, 9H-QDH, flying as RYR5MK. It carried the same two characters on the front of its registration as 9H-SIL, for a very different airline.

So when a 9H turns up on a flight tracker, it tells you where the aircraft is registered, not necessarily who is flying it.

Why Sardinia

Sardinia is a big part of Aeroitalia's network. Its Service Charter, published by ENAC, lists the "territorial continuity" routes it flies between the island and the mainland: Olbia and Alghero to Milan Linate and Rome Fiumicino, and services from Cagliari since October 2024. They are the routes the Italian state tenders to keep the island connected to the mainland, and Alghero is exactly where 9H-SIL was heading when my friend took the picture.

The -700 is getting harder to find

The 737-700 is the smaller sibling of the -800 that fills most European holiday flights, and it is quietly disappearing. TUI's have gone. Ryanair Group has a single example.

That is what makes a -700 on approach at sunset worth a photograph. Especially one that, on paper, was supposed to have been taken apart nine months earlier.

Sources