LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Workers began taking apart the world's largest airplane Tuesday, a two-month project that will move the Spruce Goose to its new home in Oregon.
Evergreen AirVenture Museum, new owners of the flying boat built by eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, said crews began removing the eight, 17-foot propellers in the first step of the plane's move to McMinnville, Ore., 45 miles southwest of Portland.
The plane, which was built to haul 750 combat troops and two tanks and weighs 400,000 pounds, will be broken down into 38 separate elements that will be shipped to Oregon by truck, ship and barge.
Following disassembly, which is open to the public, the fuselage, wings and tail cone will be shrink-wrapped for protection from the sea air and loaded onto an ocean barge. En route to McMinnville, the aircraft will travel up the Pacific Coast, then east to Portland via the Columbia River.
At Portland, the aircraft will be loaded onto river barges with a more shallow draft and barged south on the Willamette River to an off- loading point yet to be determined. The aircraft components will then be trucked to the museum site.
The Spruce Goose, which is actually covered with laminated birch, has a wingspan of 320 feet, is 219 feet long and stands eight stories high at the tail. Its eight giant engines produce 3,000 horsepower apiece.
It flew only once, in 1947, when Hughes piloted it along Long Beach Harbor for about a mile at an altitude of only 70 feet. With WWII over, there was no real use for the plane, whose official name was the H-4 Hercules, and Hughes stored it in a temperature-controlled hangar for more than three decades before it was resurrected by the Aero Club of Southern California and the Wrather Corp.
The plane has been housed beneath the world's largest free-standing dome next to the Queen Mary since 1983. Walt Disney Company has leased the Spruce Goose and the Queen Mary since 1988, operating them as tourist attractions. Disney said earlier this year it wanted to terminate both leases because the attractions were not profitable.
The Goose was sold last Friday by its owner, a subsidiary of the Aero Club, for an undisclosedprice to Del Smith, an airplane collector who owns Evergreen International Aviation.
