The latest addition to the Museum of Flight’s airplane collection, a Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet jet, landed in Seattle today with the aid of a three-story-high crane.
The No. 2 jet, which is on permanent loan from the National Naval Air Museum in Pensacola, Fla., didn’t make the trip the way it did last year, by air. Instead, it was driven to Jet City on the back of a flatbed truck, over the course of six days.
The truck driver, Buddy Chapman of Blossom, Texas, said the sight caused a traffic jam wherever he stopped.
“You’d stop in the littlest town in Wyoming, and you wouldn’t be there but five minutes and you’d have 30 people around it,” he told GeekWire.
While aviation buffs and their kids watched, the truck pulled into a museum parking lot behind the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery, accompanied by a police escort. Sections of the detached wings were offloaded using a forklift, and then the giant crane pulled in to lift the jet off the back of a truck and set it back down.
