An Airbus A320 airliner has made a momentous journey from Estonia to the south of Germany – by ship and by Actros!
The Airbus' flying days ended with a heavy landing in the coastal city of Tallinn, the impact causing major damage.
Thus it was secured as a training tool for the elite KSK special forces unit of the German army – a group often called on in anti-terrorism operations.
The only difficulty was….its base is in the Black Forest, in southern Germany – at least 2100 kilometres and five countries away!
Hence Stuttgart-based heavy haulage specialist PAULE was called in – sending one of its 630-horsepower Mercedes-Benz SLT heavy haulage tractor units to Estonia to load the fuselage of the Airbus and carefully (and slowly) take it to a truck ferry.
Even without its wings, engines and tailplane, the Airbus was a difficult load: Sixty metres long, weighing 90 tonnes and five metres wide.
The ferry carried the truck, transporter and its unusual load across the Baltic Sea to the northern German port of Lübeck.
And then the most spectacular part of the journey began – the PAULE team only able to travel at night for the 900km journey, via Hamburg, Magdeburg, Nuremberg and Stuttgart…attracting big crowds of spectators along the way.
Twice along the route, the heavy-haulage convoy had to leave the motorway to avoid low bridges. The Actros SLT also had to reverse the long combination along a side road to get back onto the autobahn.
A second PAULE Actros SLT was needed to get the Airbus over a tight and steep forest road to the KSK base at Calw, where it will be used as a realistic training tool in exercises designed to protect airline passengers.