A military jet is being sold for $1.5 million on Kijiji. Photo: Kijiji Marty Klinkenberg
EDMONTON – Along with the well-worn futons, tired loveseats and suspect mattresses, bargain hunters shopping on Kijiji in Alberta on Friday stumbled across a high-flying ad with much loftier ambitions.
Once used by Britain’s Royal Navy to fly missions in Kosovo, a Sea Harrier FA2 fighter jet is being offered by a collector in Red Deer for $1.5 million.
If the asking price sounds steep, consider it comes with dummy missiles, lifts off vertically, and can fly faster than the speed of sound.
“This is an extremely rare opportunity,” Ian Cotton says. “We’ll see if there is anyone out there crazy enough to buy it.
“It is the ultimate boy toy.”
A Scotsman who worked as an engineer for Rolls-Royce when he moved to Alberta in 1995, Cotton owns five other decommissioned British fighter jets — a supersonic Electric Lightning, a Strikemaster attack aircraft and three subsonic Hawker Hunters.
He acquired all with the dream of making them airworthy, but has been so preoccupied running a firm that modifies turbine engines to pump oil and natural gas down pipelines that he hasn’t found the time.
A week ago, he posted the ad for the Harrier on Kijiji; on Friday, officials from the online classified site started sharing photos of it on social media.
“We sell a lot of interesting things, but we don’t get big-ticket items like million-dollar fighter jets too often,” Victor Pek, a community relations officer for Kijiji in Toronto, says. “We’ve seen smaller planes like Cessnas a few times, but nothing ever quite like this.”
Cotton acquired the Harrier five years ago from the Royal Navy, and is selling the aircraft, along with an extra fuselage and a second cockpit that could be used for display or converted into a flight simulator.
The fighter jet was built in 1986 and upgraded in 1997, and accumulated about 1,000 hours of flying time before it was decommissioned in 2001. Cotton is selling it for display purposes only, but says components are available to make it airworthy.
“It is still a very capable aircraft,” he says. “The harder thing is finding someone crazy enough to fly it.”
Nearly 5,000 people have viewed Cotton’s ad so far — and he has received one fishy nibble from a prospective buyer who offered to send him $1.5 million via PayPal.
“He wanted me to send him $800 first for transportation costs,” Cotton says. “It sounded suspicious to me.
“Shipping that thing cost a little change shy of $30,000.”
The Harrier has one other nifty feature — it comes with an ejection seat. While fun, it’s not a great selling point.
“The problem is that anyone who uses it is looking at $1.5 million going down in flames beneath them,” Cotton says.
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