We had to move an aircraft from St Jakobi school to the Rowland Flat airfield. This was a challenging exercise as we had to pull the plane apart, put it onto a truck and a trailer to transport it to the Airfield, then re-assemble it.
The picture shows the plane at the airfield, almost re-assembled.
The first job was to pump up the tyres so we could move the plane more easily. One tyre was beyond repair so we had to manage with two good tyres and one flat.We moved the plane to a level, hard surface to make the disassembly safer, then hung the aircraft from a forklift while we pulled the wings off. The wings had not been removed for several years, so there were a few problems in persuading them to separate from the fuselage.
Eventually, we got them off and loaded them onto a truck from Lyndoch Motors. The fuselage was put on a big trailer and the convoy was ready to move off to the Airfield.A Wide Load sign was on the lead truck and on the tail of the plane and a red flag (Steves 2nd best red shirt) was also hung on the offside tailplane. Bryce drove the truck and was also signalling to oncoming traffic to slow down. It worked most of the time but there were a couple of close calls when oncoming drivers did not believe the Wide Load sign or Bryce's frantic signals.
We got to the airfield and were met by another forklift and driver so that we could start the reassembly. This was the reverse process for pulling it apart, although we did have a few problems with bolt holes lining up. This required us to jiggle the wings up and down while the cockpit crew tried to fit the bolts in place.
The crew were:
Steve, Bryce, Peter with Peter's son as the St Jakobi forklift driver, John, Ken, Sandie, Bill, Keith and Ross as the Airfield forklift driver.
We started at 1:15 pm and were finished by 6:30 pm.
The next phase of this project will be to get the aircraft mounted on a pole near the Barossa Valley Way as a promotion for the Airshow, the Rotary Club of Barossa Valley and the Airfield.