WHICHEVER way they looked at it, it was either a dream or a nightmare.
When some residents living alongside the Tampines Expressway woke up on Monday morning, the highway outside their block had morphed into a runway.
ST Photo: Ong Chee Seng
At around 1am that morning, a Boeing 737-300 plane was nosing its way along the road and towards a pedestrian overhead bridge.
It was not scheduled for take-off though.
What they were witnessing was a rare sight: a plane "taking off" from Seletar Airport - via land - to a new stop, the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore's training ground in Changi.
For about an hour, it became the centre of attention. Residents and passing motorists gawked and took photos.
But the onlookers soon changed from spectators to speculators. The question on everyones lips was whether the 5.2m-tall plane-laden trailer would be able to fit under the overhead bridge.
Stripped of its wings and tailfin, tied to and being towed by the long trailer, the ‘sausage-shaped’ fuselage looked like it simply would not fit under.
It did.
The transport company that undertook the complex operation claimed there was a clearance of least 20cm.
The bridge clearance was 5.3m, 10cm more than the laden trailer, claimed Mr Alan Tan, the general manager of Wyn2000, the company in charge of the towing operation.
To create an additional buffer of 10cm, the 22 tyres were deflated at the scene.
Only when this was done did the trailer budge, inching slowly under the overhead bridge.
While Mr Tan said the plane did not as much as scrape the bridge, for good measure, Land Transport Authority (LTA) engineers checked the overhead roadway and declared it to be structurally sound.
Actually, over-height vehicles hitting overhead structures is not unheard of on Singapore roads.
Statistics given to The Straits Times by LTA record 127 such incidents from 2000 to date.
But a plane getting stuck would surely have been a ‘first’.
In two out of three such incidents, drivers of lorry cranes had simply failed to retract the cranes before driving under the overhead structures.
Most of them had “forgotten” to do so.
The LTA onemotoring website describes accidents in which a vehicle hits a road structure as much more than a visual spectacle. They point out how it is "potentially dangerous and costly" because it can kill road-users and damage vehicles and structures.
It is a punishable offence under the law too.
So, the authorities are keen to apply the brakes on what they regard as an unnecessary spectacle. Some measures have included the screening of videos to learner drivers and information packages.
Future drivers - or land-based ‘pilots’ - who feel the sky’s the limit may need to remember the height limit as well.