The decommissioned plane now houses a mini-restaurant in an amusement park.
On average a classic A320 is expected to have a service life of 30 to 40 years. The manufacturers usually plan for 50,000 flights. This machine was formerly in service within the fleet of the Russian airline Aeroflot.
It even transported the Olympic flame to the city of Sochi in 2014. The last journey of the decommissioned plane has now taken place on a heavy duty platform trailer CombiMAX.
Fuselage was 36.5 m long
The Czech experts from Pavel Svestka s.r.o. were commissioned to handle this task. „The fuselage was separated from the wings for the road transport“, explains company manager Pavel Svestka, for whom such projects always represent something special. The fuselage, which weighed almost 19 t with a length of 36.5 m, a width of 6 m and a height of 4.7 m, proved to be a big challenge.
„With a gross combination weight of about 80 tonnes we set off from the Czech airport Ostrava Mošnov to a privately run airfield near Liptovsky Mikulas in Slovakia“, says Pavel Svetska, outlining the key data of the approximately 200 km route.
Height gain for low tunnels
The company made use of CombiMAX elements for the composition of the vehicle. Svetska has two goosenecks, 2, 3, 4 and 5-axle units (one of each), an excavator deck and two flatbeds with extension supports.
For the Airbus project the transport professionals chose a 4+5 combination with telescopically extendable excavator deck as a connection between the two bogies.
„Thanks to the CombiMAX system we were able to put the heavy duty platform trailer together in such a way that the aircraft fuselage could be optimally loaded. The low height of the bogies and the 600 mm stroke of the pendle-axles also came in handy for us, because they allowed us to gain the crucial millimetres when driving through tunnels“, says Pavel Svestka, listing a few of the concrete advantages of the Faymonville modular vehicle.
The left and right wings of the aircraft, the tail and the rudder subsequently followed in further shipments. The individual parts were then reassembled in the amusement park, where visitors are now able to eat in a real Airbus A320.