How Do You Mount a Boeing 747 to the Roof of a Museum? Very Carefully
30 April 2020, Rhineland-Palatinate, Speyer: Cars are parked on a parking lot in front of a screen in the drive-in cinema of the Technik Museum Speyer. In the background a model of a Boeing 747 airplane can be seen as an exhibit.Photo: Uwe Anspach/picture alliance (Getty Images)
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.
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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:
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)
Boeing 747
Once at the museum, the 747 was reassembled on 100-foot poles, giving it that very cool mid-takeoff orientation. Visitors can take a tour inside and see sections of stripped-down plane showing the inner workings of the 747. The cockpit and first class are also open for all to check out, though this plane retired in 2001, so it isn’t the most up-to-date model. You can even walk out on to the wing!
