Wings Transport
(Sept 7, 2025) I delayed transport of the wings by a few weeks to allow me time to catch up on a few tasks to complete on the wings – installation of my fancy LED lighting system, and a custom boost pump setup at the wing roots. With both of these tasks complete, I proceeded with transporting the wings to the airport to re-unite with the rest of the kit. I rented a 20 foot Uhaul truck, which is actually just under 17 feet in length in the main box (the remaining 3 feet is their “mom’s attic”, which obviously is of no use for moving a wing). The wings are just over 16 feet long so this worked just fine.
The wings had been resting in the cradle using just carpet remnants as the slings, but for this trip I wanted to add some cushioning from the vibration. I had an old memory foam mattress topper that I cut into 6 inch wide strips, this wound up adding a great deal of protection to the wings with minimal effort.
Loading the wings was a multi-step process, first taking the wings off their cradle so that we could put the cradle in the truck. The wings themselves are not that heavy, maybe 100 lbs each, but they’re just awkward to handle – but having three sets of hands made the task simple. After we moved the cradle to the truck, we re-stacked each wing in the cradle. The longest step in this process was figuring out how to secure the wings and cradle to the truck — my solution was to ratchet strap the wings to the cradle (2 straps), and then strap the cradle to the truck wall slats using two more ratchet straps, for a total of four straps – not too bad.
I’m happy to report the wings survived the 16 mile trip to the airport without incident.
