With the escalation in Ukraine and my airplane sitting at Termikas in Lithuania for another few weeks, I am considering how I might retrieve it if (for instance) a no-fly zone were to be created or Putin gets really ambitious about his territorial advancement. Does anyone have experience with shipping an airplane?
A lot of elbow grease (read: work) but otherwise straightforward if you use a shipping company container. Take off extremities necessary to fit the aircraft into a container. Ship the container (in your case likely by truck) to the destination airport. Put it back together and sign off reassembly as airworthy. I shipped my C172 from Singapore to Rotterdam in 1996 and it cost a fair bit for labour and shipping, but the process was otherwise rather simple. Shipping companies will deliver you an empty container and then you notify them when ready with pick-up and delivery locations. They do the rest.
Of course if you want to be hands-on end-to-end then you need to organize the whole transport part yourself. Within Europe, that might be quite a bit less expensive if you have good access to a trucking company as they could just put the dismounted aircraft on a flatbed truck.
The question is in what status the airplane is at the moment. If there is a chance of putting it together and make it airworthy relatively p.d.q then I’d evakuate it via Sweden. Visby is 250 NM or so from Kaunas.
Otherwise it surely can be trucked but the dismantling and rigging for transport needs to be done with utmost care. I suppose Termikas should be capable of doing that. Again the question is whether to wait out work completion or getting it out faster. Personally I doubt that Russia will attack Lithuania any time soon, but who knows. On the other hand no fly zones or similar stuff is a very real possibility.
chflyer wrote:
A lot of elbow grease (read: work) but otherwise straightforward
It will depend on the aircraft. On some you can take off the wings with bolts. On others there are rivets and it is a huge project. Then you have to build a wood structure to support the parts in the container etc. I would not do this unless absolutely required.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
The question is in what status the airplane is at the moment. If there is a chance of putting it together and make it airworthy relatively p.d.q then I’d evakuate it via Sweden. Visby is 250 NM or so from Kaunas.
Sweden is certainly on the list of possible exit routes if the Poland route becomes no-fly for some reason. At this point PDQ is end of March as it’s disassembled for painting at the moment. Assembly will begin next week, and the last thing I want is a hastily assembled aircraft.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Personally I doubt that Russia will attack Lithuania any time soon, but who knows.
I really hope you’re right, but today’s events show that Putin is willing to make up any pretext he wishes and that his goal is territorial expansion. He has said in the past that he doesn’t acknowledge the Baltics as part of NATO. I think we have not seen the end of his ambition. But I know there’s another thread on this topic, so I’ll not digress…
Sebastian_G wrote:
I would not do this unless absolutely required.
Agree it’s not the ideal scenario, especially since I’d really like to test everything while there at the shop.
I shipped my plane from California to France last year – I posted about it a while ago, with a pointer to my blog article about it.
It cost me about $9000 to take the wings etc off, put it in a container and ship it to France. Then about €3000 to unpack it and put the wings etc back on.
You need to find someone on both ends who is used to doing this, preferably with your specific type – easier if you have a Cessna than an Airbalonika 96B.
John
