Moving from Petaluma to San Carlos

After waiting nearly six years on the hangar waiting list, a spot finally came up at San Carlos airport.  The rules of the list are once you're offered a spot you have 30 days to get a long list of documentation to the airport manager, and have a plane in the hangar.  That meant that despite the fact that the plane wasn't quite ready to fly to the new home, it would have to get there somehow.  

After researching how folks had moved their projects, looking at a few builder websites, and considering my options, I chose to move it "flat" on a truck, rather than a trailer.  The main spar of the cozy is roughly 11' 6" wide with the strakes in place, which is wider than legal pretty much everywhere.  Your choices are to get the wide load permit, rotate the whole thing about 45 degrees to meet the width requirement, or point it vertically with the spar running longitudinally on the axis of the truck/trailer.  I researched each option and found that the easiest way was to get the wide load permit.  In California (and probably most other states) a wide load permit for under 12 feet can be had with little hassle, and no need for a pilot car.  I applied for the permit by fax (what decade is this?!) to CalTrans, and with only a minor amount of back and forth I was granted a permit for the sum total of $16.  

A local truck rental place has a cab-over 16' stake-bed truck with a lift gate for $50/day plus $0.30 per mile and fuel.  The lift gate turned out to make this a very EZ task, and I would highly recommend finding one if you need to move a plane.  The truck vs trailer decision was made because the truck would get the strake way up high, over the top of even the bigger SUVs on the road.  If I had a trailer with the strakes at car level I would have been paranoid of someone not paying attention and hitting it.  As it was I stayed to the right side of the lane, especially when big trucks were passing by, and there were no clearance issues.  

The permit conditions specified which roads I could drive on and when.  This turned what would be 65 mile trip into a 120 mile adventure.  I was required to have wide load signs on the front and rear of the truck.  Those were easily sourced on ebay for $30.  

We started early in the morning, figuring the first we could possibly be on the road was 9 AM per the permit curfew.  We set the lift gate roughly halfway down, and used two motorcycle ramps to roll the plane up to the lift gate.  Once it was on the lift gate, we chocked the tires, lifted the gate the rest of the way, and rolled the plane into place.  Literally 5 minutes after we started this process the plane was on the truck.  I was amazed.  The wheels were chocked by 2x4s screwed to the deck of the truck.  We ratchet strapped the axles down, and put a 3" wide ratchet strap over the top of the canard mount to hold the nose.  All ratchet straps were covered with towels and corners were covered with cardboard to protect the plane.  It ended up taking us almost exactly 3 hours to get everything on the truck and secured to my satisfaction.

The drive to San Carlos was completely uneventful.  I had my friend drive my car behind just to keep an eye out for anything shaking loose, and it took us the better part of 2 1/2 hours to make our way down to San Carlos.  Unloading was the reverse of loading, with the exception of the fact that we figured out that if you were willing to let the plane's nose get pretty high (which meant I was holding a fair amount of weight down to keep it from falling on my brand-new rebuilt engine!) that we could actually lower the lift gate right to the ground and skip the loading ramps altogether.

I am sure there are a million ways to move a plane, but this one turned out to be really EZ.