The Boeing, rejected from air traffic, standing fully equipped in all (see picture) next to other planes waiting to be scraped, close to the Johannesburg International airport. Our client, the company UNIVERSAL SCRAP METALS, owner of a HAMMEL primary shredder VB 950 DK, had the order, to scrap the plane, in order to clear the airport ground. We couldn’t miss out on this one …

After arrival at the airport we were directly brought to the area, where the Boeing 747 was standing and off it went... A grabber drove towards the plane and tore, as you can see in the picture, huge parts off the plane, in order to load them on a truck. Of course it would have been possible for us to bring the primary shredder on the airport ground, but there were objections by the environmental authority concerning possible danger of ground contamination. So we drove the truck loads to the site of UVIVERSAL SCRAP METALS in the west of Johannesburg (approx. 30 km from the airport), there we unloaded the torn parts directly to the primary shredder VB 950 DK.

The results were remarkable: the valuable NON-FE material carried out via the discharge belt had a size of approx. 100 - 150 mm. Furthermore a smaller amount of FE material with the same grain size of FE material was produced. The achieved end product has the perfect size to load the hammer mill used at their site, in order to sort into finest parts.