‘The coolest thing I’ve ever done’
Justin Salter and his company, Berard Transportation, have been part of some pretty amazing hauls over the years – the world’s largest pair of sector gates, a 150-year-old and 400-ton oak tree.
But the latest haul is the one that stands out for Salter.
“So we do some wild and crazy stuff,” Salter said. “Over the road, this is probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done, and that’s out of some really, really cool stuff. But this one is pretty awesome.”
This one was the opportunity to transport a B-1 bomber.
In early June, New Iberia, La.-based Berard moved a B-1B 86-101 Watchman airplane from Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma 272 miles to the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University in Kansas.
That’s a lot of plane: 167 feet long, 29 feet wide, and nearly 16 feet tall, totaling in at 214,000 pounds.
It’s a good thing they had some practice. In the spring of 2020, Berard Transportation hauled a full B-1B Bone bomber airframe from Tucson, Ariz., to Wichita.
That one traversed 1,500 miles. This one was shorter in distance, but as you might imagine there were challenges.
Salter, who was project manager for this haul, says there are always challenges when transporting something this big.[su_image_carousel source=”media: 38703,38704,38705,38706,38707,38708,38709″ limit=”7″ crop=”none” align=”center” captions=”yes” autoplay=”4″]
“We had 37 feet of head swing,” Salter said. “So if you get into a right-hand turn, the truck is going right and the head is swinging out … We had a trucking full axle steer dolly in the rear, and, as long as this thing is, you got to worry about where the steering stops, and every turn I was watching overall and another project manager with us on this one who was watching the head swing when they would swap back and forth.
“And then we had two guys in the back, one steering and one watching the stops, if we had to manually steer it. We had low clearance on transitions to where the nose is going down. We have to worry about the rear trailer, the front portion hitting. We’re going up the hill. We have to worry about the back portion. There are times we had to lift the rear trailer to get three turns to keep it from actually hitting the bottom of the plane. We had to transport the width of 29 feet. That was challenge No. 1.”
One of many.
State police helped with some of the others, namely stopping traffic about a mile ahead of the transport and steering them clear of the wide berth the B-1 bomber needed.
Signs were removed along the way and replaced once the plane had moved past. Salter said that slowed them down quite a bit on the back roads. The whole thing played out over a day and a half.
They started early on a Friday morning. Ten hours later, they were barely over the Kansas border.
“It was late,” Salter said. “It was a long day.”
Then the next morning, they were up and at it again for a total of five more hours behind the wheel, bringing the grand total to 15 hours of drive time.
But that doesn’t include the months of planning leading up to the big day and one final push just two weeks before.
Salter said his Houston office handled the coordination and worked with Kansas and Oklahoma, which made the company wait until two weeks before the haul to apply.
“So that is a huge challenge with this size of cargo,” Salter said. “Only two weeks for the final planning. That was a bit hectic.”
Especially when you consider that Salter and company were on another job just before this one, moving a drum for Goodyear that measured 24 feet wide and half-a-million pounds gross about 370 miles from Houston to San Angelo, Texas.
But everything went off without a hitch – and the B-1 bomber is at its new home in Wichita, where it’ll be used as a research tool to lengthen the life of B-1 bombers that are still in service.
And for the current field of pilots who sit in the cockpit of the current fleet of B-1 bombers, that’s an important thing. Which is why they gave Salter and the plane a proper sendoff when they left from Tinker Air Force Base.
“They asked us whenever we pull out on the road and get that last tire on the road … to just stop for a second and let them salute it on its way out for its last journey,” Salter said. “So we obviously obliged.” LL