The US has a bad problem with institutional stupidity… ignoring history and science and whatnot. But compared to some countries, we’re the friggen’ Jedi Archives. Take, for example, Monino.
The US has – among others – the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton; Russia has the Monino Central Air Force Museum, where they’ve got all their neato aircraft developed by the USSR and Russia over the decades. Well, they’ve got it at the moment, but apparently not for long. Two Russian-language articles, because there doesn’t yet seem to be anything out there in English on this (I used Chrome to auto translate):
Silence Monino
and
Aviamuzey in Monino: on the threshold of annihilation?
The auto-translate is a bit iffy, but it seems that the museum is closing and the exhibits will relocate to Kubinka, which is some distance from Monino (according to Google maps, about 135 kilometers). At first this doesn’t seem *too* bad, but apparently they want to do it in a hurry (by *July* of THIS YEAR). As a result of that, a lot of exhibits will be simply tossed, and some larger aircraft will be chopped up for easy transport, and presumably welded back together at the new place. You know, kinda like slicing up the Mona Lisa and sticking it back together with Gorilla Glue.
The aircraft at Monimo will largely never fly again, due to simply not being maintained. So the only way to transport hem would be to chopper the smaller aircraft, and take the larger ones via truck. But cargo planes, strategic bombers and jetliners tend to not fit very well on surface streets. Thus the plan to disassemble the planes. But a lot of aircraft simply weren’t designed to be unbolted to the point where they’d fit on roads; instead, a lot of major components will *need* to be cut apart.
The photo below is marked to show the aircraft that are expected to be sliced up for transport:
Oh, *hell* no.
Come on, people. This is Russia. They’re used to thinking and building big. So how about this: build yourselves some *big* balloons. Big enough to lift these aircraft. Tether the balloons to massively laden trucks, and then, on days where the weather permits, simply drive them to the new place, suspended under the balloons. This might require severing power lines, but that’d be a temporary disruption and easily planned for and easily restored. So long as the truck will fit under any overpasses, the tethers can be disconnected on one side of the overpass and reconnected on the other. Use multiple trucks and a tether with multiple connections on the ground end, and do it a truck at a time. Might be slow… but it’d be a hell of a show.
