Tupolev Tu-154 goes on a road trip

[upnorth]

Hello all,

 

I'm a bit later than I intended in getting these pictures up. I took them at Kunovice, Czech Republic last Sunday (25.9.2016) when a new exhibit for the museum there arrived.

 

A former Czech air force Tupolev Tu-154M was, after two years of work and a very successful internet crowdfunding campaign, moved by road from Prague's Kbely airfield to Kunovice. This particular aircraft has the nickname "Nagano Express" as it was used to fly the gold medal winning Czech ice hockey team home from the 1998 Wintoer Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

 

The whole project was called Velký Přelet or The Great Flight. Enough money was raised through crowdfunding that the museum could not only move the aircraft, but also buy fresh fasteners to reassemble it and give it a fresh coat of paint among other things.

 

At that, here's some pictures from the day:

 

 

If you wish to know more about the Velký Přelet project or the Kunovice air museum and their activities, please click on the link to my "Pickled Wings" aviation blog in my signature line below.

[stringbag]

Nice to see one of these fabulous aircraft preserved.

Thanks for posting

 

Chris

[exdraken]

Nice project! 

Good to see also large planes preserved....

[Jinxman]

We just missed it! Took a trip there on the Sunday after a couple of days in Ostrava - a fantastic museum with good access to the airframes and nice to see jet fighters with engines in and so on.

 

I hope they fulfil their wish to get all of the airframes undercover at some stage,

 

cheers, and thanks for the pics..

[stevehnz]

Another museum to add to my world tour of aircraft museums list ( High on my dream bucket list), . From this side of the world, I've always thought the Tu-154 was rather an underperformer but maybe we only heard of the ones that fell out of the sky, they seemed to do so fairly often. One thing that has always struck me about them is how much the front end looks like a Brittania, & that can be no bad thing.

Steve.

[upnorth]

4 hours ago, stevehnz said:

Another museum to add to my world tour of aircraft museums list ( High on my dream bucket list), . From this side of the world, I've always thought the Tu-154 was rather an underperformer but maybe we only heard of the ones that fell out of the sky, they seemed to do so fairly often. One thing that has always struck me about them is how much the front end looks like a Brittania, & that can be no bad thing.

Steve.

 

Definitely the Kunovice museum is one to visit if you're in the south east of the Czech Republic.

 

A few years back, the museum's ownership and administration changed and it has been a change for the better. The first time I visited it, before the ownership change, it felt like one of those depressing yards of derelicts trying to pass itself off as a museum. Since the change, there is a distinctly different feeling about the place and it's clear that they have a lot more of their destiny under direct control and are a lot more free to make plans for the future than they used to be.

[F-32]