40 hours and 4 planes, this is the brief summary of the return journey of the MotoGP teams from the Mandalika circuit on the island of Lombok in Indonesia to Europe.
Of course, it's long, very long, but what about motorcycles?
Crated on the evening of Sunday March 20, they wisely waited until Thursday the 24th to be loaded into a Boeing 747-222B(SF) of the Aerostan company based in Manas in Kyrgyzstan (!), heading for… Colombo in Sri Lanka Lanka.
The next day, two flights were on the program, a Colombo-Mombasa (Kenya), then a Mombasa-Lagos (Nigeria) in 4 hours 50 minutes.
The flight plan of the Kyrgyzstane cargo plane kept the same tempo the next day, with two flights carried out on Saturday 26: Lagos-Salvador (Brazil) in 6 hours, then Salvador-Tucuman (Argentina) in 4 hours.
The white and red 747 landed safely on the runway of the Teniente Benjamin Matienzo International Airport in San Miguel de Tucumán, and the boxes were then loaded onto trucks to make the 90 kilometers that separate Tucuman from the Termas de Tucumán circuit. Rio Hondo.
As it landed immediately, the 2nd Aerostan B747-2(SF) with registration number (EX-47001) at the Tucumán airport with MotoGP equipment!
Gracias @francobenegassok for the videos!. @aeropuertotuc pic.twitter.com/dRXBHZICqU— Spotters Tucumán (@SpottersTUC) March 26, 2022
We would spare you the 4 other cargo planes (including another 747 from the same company and Boeing 777s from Qatar Cargo) which transport the equipment necessary for the Argentine Grand Prix, if the press had only informed one of them. between them had known a technical problem immobilizing it in Mombasa. It contains among other things the Ducati of the official team, the Gresini Racing team, the VR46, the KTMs of Raul Fernandez and many other things.
We do not have precise information on this broken down plane but we noticed that, very curiously, the beautiful red and white bird which illustrates this article had returned to… Lombok, a destination inevitably linked to MotoGP. From there, he took exactly the same route as during his first trip, via Colombo and Mombasa, where he landed yesterday evening at 21:30 p.m.
Suffice it to say that if it is ultimately he who is responsible for bringing the Ducatis back to Argentina, they will not be there on Thursday morning, as the world championship leader thought, but at the earliest on Thursday evening, and even sooner during the night from Thursday to Friday…
Moreover, at the time of publishing these lines, no cargo plane has recently landed in Tucuman, according to available information.
In any case, we are following the flight of this very mysterious BSC4042, while hoping to be wrong...
We thank the Argentine spotters from Tucuman for photos… and monitoring local air traffic.
As a reminder, with the exception of the Ducati, all MotoGPs travel with a compressed air cylinder connected to the pneumatic valve return system, and all are emptied of all their fluids, battery removed.
