Ever see a plane cut in half? (Pics/Vid ARE UP)
 

Well, you will. Right now I'm on a lunch break but we've decided to scrap one of our maintenance aircraft because it was taking up space. So, after doing some measuring we found out that it won't fit on our flatbed.

Solution?

Cut the wings and empennage off. First step.. the empennage (tail). I decided to document this occasion in both film and photo as when else are you going to see the ass end of an airplane cut up right in front of you? Definately one of the better days of this program, that's for sure.

I has pics..

Oh, and today's victim:

PA-23-250 Piper Aztec C/D
Tail: N14301
Motors: 2x Lycoming TIO-540-C4B5

Diagnosis: Terminal
Treatment: Cut that Mothereffer up.

Final Scrap Value: TBD

Does the owner know your going to do this? (he-he):sm0:

I'll take the motors.

Damn you beat me to them

Updated with pics. Waiting for the video to finish on Youtube before I post it. Should be up tonight or at least tomorrow.

Video is now up.

I'm confused. If scrapping it why not just throw it on a trailer and take it to the scrap yard? If taking it apart why not get some experience and drill the rivets out? Zabo, if your school is scrapping planes out just to create some space then they are charging you way to much money to go there!

We have a Sabreliner, Merlin IIB, Baron 58P, and a C172R as maintenance aircraft. All of which can fly if need be. The Aztec was the lame duck and just needed to go (clipped wings and stabilators). So we used it as a learning experience on control rigging and tension checks before we 'de-rigged' the tail and removed it.

We were going to keep the front half due to the internal structure being a tube/semi-monocoque frame setup. You don't see that too often. The tail, however, had to go.

Not to mention this plane had been sitting there for a long while, and was a hurricane refugee (never flew). We got a new aircraft (The Baron) about 3 years ago and this one became a secondary teaching aid and also if you noticed it WAS a rivet project for freshman finals for about 10 years. We are saving the engines and several parts of this aircraft to mock up components for Flight/Maintenance training to understand how flight surfaces work. Not to mention we don't have a working TIO engine, and this one has everything to serve as an operational spare bin for one we're almost done with.

It was old, rusted, rotted, and started to leak hydraulic fluid. University "Asset" officials said to get it out of there and scrap it for cash (budget this, budget that), so now we're getting around to it with the COA's blessing. I mean we've had worse..

We had a NWA 747-200 on the ramp for a time..