Fokker

Sometime earlier this year................

After a quick blast down to Romford this morning to deliver a 1.5t JCB mini digger I was back in the Chelmsford area at 0800 at Hanningfield Metals. This is a funny little yard that specialises in aircraft salvage and breaking, although they still break aircraft they tend to specialise in hiring or selling stuff for use in film / tv rather than actually scrapping the gear. There's no one about except for the guard dog, so I put the kettle on and wait, shortly afterwards Norman arrives in the other 6 wheeler and we stand about enjoying the morning sun. The owner of the yard has been delayed and it is about 0845 before we are able to get in. There is barely room for one wagon in the yard, so mine is parked out of the way in the yard next door whilst we start throwing tons of crap out of the fuselage of a Fokker F27 which is to be our 1st lift.
Norm reverses out of the yard, I pull up alogside and we cross load the fuselage onto my truck and I decide to use chains rather than straps as there's plenty of sharp ally about.

Norm then pulls back into the yard and loads the cockpit section and we are off in convoy headed for Qinetiq, Chertsey.
We get a fair few weird looks as we make our way around the M25, but the best is a bloke on some roadworks near Chobham who nearly falls down the hole in the road as he is having a good gawp. The site isn't really Chertsey but right alongside the London bound carriageway of the M3, I've often wondered what the run down looking factory place is all about.
We pull up at security and tell the bloke we are after building L84, we have do double back on ourselves and cross the M3 on the overbridge leading to the test track side if the site. It would seem that this place is used to test military vehicles and there are all sorts of rough surfaces and other interesting looking facilities with a few weird and wondeful bits of kit around. I'd love to be able to snoop around a bit but it's an MOD type place and I really don't want to start wandering about with the camera.
We find L84, it's a hangar type workshop building being used by a film crew who are filming an episode of Spooks there. It would seem that there has been a plane crash and our old junk is the wreckage that the investigators will be looking at. This old scrap has been hired at £1500 for the week, transport costs on top.
There are planty of luvvy types involved here, Oooh it's wonderful etc. I have never seen so many neckerchiefs, there was also a bloke with a handbag. They faffed about for a while before getting a rigger to make up a dolly onto which the fuselage was loaded, it was then pulled into place with several of them pulling, pushing etc trying to assist a 2wd Hilux. It didn't occur to them to ask for my 420hp so I didn't bother to offer. They were almost bursting with excitement when it came to the cockpit so I decided to leave them to it and trundled off to my next job, as lightly more mundane digger & dumper move.

This is what it looked like before it was scrapped at Southend airport.

THE RETURN JOURNEY

Up early this morning and in the yard at 0530, Norm had already left as he had to collect a steel staircase in Dunmow at 0600 and deliver it to a site in the High St shortly afterwards where a mobile crane would take over. We figured that if all went well we shouldn’t be too far apart on the M25 on our way back to Qinetiq at Chertsey.He was about half hour behind on the M25 and where I slipped through the traffic without delay, he was not quite so lucky and hit some of the traffic. I arrived on site at 0745 and trundled off round to building L84 and parked up next to the huge inclines designed for tank testing

As it was quiet I had a snoop about before returning to the bunk and the kettle.

Shortly after I had been poking about there was activity by the weighbridge office but after a few minutes they got back in their Land Rover and cleared off. Some of the film people showed up and started lugging bits of props out of the hangar and I decided to secure all the loose bits that had been stuffed inside the fuselage which had been wheeled outside the hangar.

Norm arrived just before 0900, my half hour lead had gained another half hour, and soon we were talked into shifting the portacabin that he’d moved on Monday back to the other side of the site. It had clearly seen better days and it was a bit dodgy walking on the roof to attach the chains. It was on and we took it back to the North side of the site where we were told to position it right behind some race cars that they wanted blocking in. Not to stop them being stolen, but because the site manager had got fed up telling whoever they belonged to not to leave them there.
Back over the bridge there was some activity going on, there was a brand new airport fire engine being tested on the perimeter test track, it didn’t arf sound good as it thundered around. Banked corners and all, some people get jammy jobs. Outside L84 is a huge tarmac area with circles painted on for testing cars on and there were a couple of artics on the far side that looked like they might have some development vehicles on board, however all we saw was what looked like a rigid tent being assembled.
Although I’d love to stay and have a good nose around and see what’s happening we did need to get on with the job and we loaded the fuselage on to my truck first as it was the easy part. The cockpit was still inside the hangar and one set of doors had been damaged so we had to enter from the other end and bump down the step inside. Trying to use the crane inside a building is obviously difficult, so we settled for just getting it onboard roughly before trundling back outside to get in on board properly.

After a brew up we were all set to go at 1040 and we trundled off through Virginia Water to Egham to pick up the M25 at J13 which seemed like a better route than their original instructions of J11.

The run back to Hanningfield Metals was good and the aircraft was offloaded in reverse order to how we loaded.

My next job was a little more mundane, a 5t digger and 4t dumper from Chelmsford to High Easter before running down to Basildon to collect a crosshired 7t JCB, this was added to at the yard with a 3t dumper before leaving for home at 1630.