The Papyrus Hunter takes a detour
The company Emil Egger transports a fighter bomber half way across Switzerland. 18 Swiss air force FA-18 jets landed on the country’s A1 motorway recently, 33 years after the last time aeroplanes belonging to the Swiss flight force, as it was then known, landed on a Swiss national road. On 14 November 1991 twelve Hawker Hunters also took part in the exercise, code-named ‘Strada’, on the N2 motorway near Lodrino.
The Hawker Hunter J-4015 with the civil registration code HB-RVS is better known to connoisseurs as the ‘Papyrus Hunter’. After maintenance work last year it was initially set to be flown back to its home air base at St. Stephan, in the Bernese Oberland, from Altenrhein, on Lake Constance. After its retirement in 1994 it was operated as a vintage aircraft by the local association ‘Hunterverein Obersimmental’ from the year 2000 onwards.
However, due to steadily rising expenditures on account of increasing maintenance requirements and ever more stringent regulations by Switzerland’s national office of civil aviation, the group decided to stop flying the vintage jet after 22 years.
Although the Swiss military aviation jewel would then no longer be able to display its timelessly classic shape in the Swiss skies, the plane would be preserved for posterity at the former military airfield of St Stephan. But how do you get a plane that’s no longer allowed to fly from Lake Constance to the Bernese Oberland? On the Swiss road network, of course.
Fingertip precision
The repatriation by road was paid for by the English company Hawker Hunter Aviation, which in return received the HB-RVS engine for its own Hunter fleet. The transport firm Emil Egger, which hails from St Gallen, was entrusted with transporting the precious freight.
The firm wasn’t only in charge of the transport, but was also asked to dismantle the aeroplane in Thal, near Altenrhein, and then reassemble the old-timer in St Stephan. Extreme precision and great fingertip sensitivity were called on to avoid any damage.
A long and winding road to the goal
A total of five vehicles were deployed. A semi-trailer with low-loader, whose loading area had been extended by 6 m for the nigh-on 14 m hull; a truck-mounted crane with a semi-trailer and accessories for the aeroplane; a tractor with a semi-trailer for the wings; another trailer for the Hunter’s accessories and another vehicle for the semi-trailer transporting the hull. The latter was approximately 25 m long, 3.6 m wide and 4.1 m high, and thus required a special permit from the authorities.
After the jet had been disassembled and loaded in Thal under the guidance of and in cooperation with the Hunter specialists from England, the convoy first took the A1 and A6 to Wimmis, from where it then took main road 11 to Zweisimmen and onwards from there to St Stephan.
The last stretch of the route was particularly challenging. Good communication via radio was of the essence, due to the rather winding road.