Yahoo Autos How Do You Mount a Boeing 747 to the Roof of a Museum? Very Carefully
The Technik Museum Speyer in, you guessed it, Speyer, Germany, had a dream: To bring the massive Boeing 747 to the masses. The only snag was just how to get such a big plane to their location and then prop it up on the roof to seem as if it were taking off from the parking lot. But when it comes to Germans, they aren’t the least bit daunted by an engineering challenge.
The museum features over 70 aircraft and helicopters and thousands of others objects pertaining to air travel. The heart of the museum, however, is its Boeing 747, still bearing its Lufthansa livery, known as Schleswig-Holstein. SimplyFlying has a decent breakdown of what it took to get this giant plan from the nearest airport 60 miles away:
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Because of the aircraft’s massive size, there was no way that it could be transported by road to the museum. Instead, museum technicians spent months disassembling the aircraft and taking it piece by piece to Speyer.
The biggest hurdle was how they were going to transport the 230-foot-long fuselage. Moving the fuselage by road was impossible, but because the River Rhine runs through both cities, they decided to float the plane down the river on specially built pontoons.
There’s some pretty cool video of the plane traveling to its new home via waterway and road (the narration is in German)
