Bruce Dickinson, vocalist for the British rock group Iron Maiden, was in bed when he got a call with devastating news about the band’s chartered Boeing 747-400.
“I was about to get up to preflight the aircraft,” recalls Dickinson, an ardent aviation enthusiast, aerospace entrepreneur and chief pilot for Iron Maiden’s “Book Of Souls” world tour. The band had just played the previous evening in Santiago, Chile, and was due to fly later that day to its next venue in Cordoba, Argentina. “They said, ‘There’s been an accident. The airplane is on its side.’ And I thought, ‘What!? Oh my God, someone has towed it down a ditch.’”
The truth, as Dickinson observes, turned out to be “way stranger than fiction.” A pin in the nose leg, inserted by the ground-handling agent’s crew to disengage the aircraft’s hydraulically powered steering system, had broken while the 747 was being towed. The nose leg steering system had rapidly and automatically realigned, flinging the still-attached tug and its two occupants to the left side of the aircraft. The ground crew jumped out, fortunately suffering only minor injuries, but the tug careened into both the No. 1 and 2 engines on the port wing.
“I haven’t heard of a pin being used that was that faulty or broken before, but that’s the way it rolled on that day,” says Dickinson. “It was something like a $100 pin and we got $15 million worth of damage. There’s a story for your safety management system. Talk about an accident waiting to happen,” he adds.
The impact of the tug caused significant damage to the nacelles and inlets of the two CF6-80C2 engines on the port wing. Credit: John McMurtrie

At the time of the accident on March 12, the band was only at its eighth stop on a grueling 47-concert tour encompassing 36 countries over five months. The 747-400, nicknamed “Ed Force One” after Iron Maiden’s somewhat gruesome “Eddie” mascot, was an ex-Air France aircraft leased from Air Atlanta, and repairing it quickly was vital to the successful execution of the tour. 
“This is our time machine, our magic carpet,” says Dickinson. “We take off from Los Angeles, cross the dateline and land in Tokyo and the next day we can do a gig. We have got the crew, the gear and all the logistics in the same place. It’s a kind of roll-on/roll-off ferry that flies, and because it’s a 747 we don’t have to stop for gas. We modified the stage show so we could fit it all in pallets under the belly,” he adds. 
“Effectively it means we can do a European tour schedule on an intercontinental basis. We can fly these long oceanic legs, such as Australia to Cape Town, [South Africa]—or Shanghai to Auckland—and you can’t do that any other way,” says Dickinson. Although the band had used a modified 757 for earlier world tours, the 747 provided both increased cargo capacity to transport equipment and the stage set, as well as increased nonstop range. “The 757 was lovely but, oh boy, the hoops we had to jump through to get the cargo-combi conversion for the back end, and the expense.”
Air Atlanta, working with Boeing, developed an immediate aircraft-on-ground (AOG) response plan to repair Ed Force One. Although it was obvious that both port engines would need replacing and a small section of fuselage skin patching, an inspection showed no signs of more significant structural damage. This was largely due to the Boeing engine attachment design in which each of the five strut-to-wing connection points includes a structural fuse pin, which is a hollow pin having less strength than the adjacent structure. As the wing structure and strut attachment fittings are designed to be stronger than the fuse pins, this assures that when a structural overload occurs, the fuse pin fails first and the wing structure, including the fuel tank, remains intact.
After repairs “Ed Force One” rejoined Iron Maiden’s “Book of Souls” concert tour in Brasilia, Brazil. Credit: Iron Maiden

“The fuse pin alignment after the accident hadn’t moved a millimeter,” says Dickinson. “The soft structures [nacelle] of the engine took the force. But these aircraft are built like tanks and we are fortunate that if it happened to any aircraft it happened to this one—a Boeing aircraft. The airline also really stepped up to the plate and did a fantastic job. They flew two engines down there within a couple of days, and about 12 engineers. They pulled them in from Jeddah, [Saudi Arabia], and Iceland and everywhere. It was like ‘bam!,’ the A-team turned up.”
Working with LAN, the tour’s handling company Air Charter Service and Rocket-It-Cargo, the U.K.-based specialist transport company supporting Iron Maiden, Air Atlanta chartered a Cargolux 747 to transport two General Electric CF6-80C2s to Chile. The engines were provided by MTU and trucked to Luxembourg from Hanover, Germany. The charter flight stopped en route at London Stansted Airport to collect cowlings and thrust reversers from Kemble, along with tools and other components brought in from Jeddah.
In the meantime, while engineers worked in shifts around the clock to replace the engines, the show had to go on. Another charter was hastily organized on the day of the accident to transport more than 20 tons of equipment and over 60 people to Cordoba for the next concert. As Dickinson commented on his band’s website “The distance is ‘only’ 1,000 km [620 mi.], but with a small matter of the Andes in between! They did it, by the skin of their teeth, and all went very well for the show in Cordoba and the other three cities Ed Force One just missed.”
3. Between gigs in Tacoma, Washington, and Denver, Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson flew “Ed Force One” to Paine Field to visit Boeing employees at the company’s Everett, Washington, facility. Credit: Tim Stake/Boeing)

The fully repaired 747 left Santiago on March 22 to rejoin the tour at Brasilia-Presidente Juscelino Kubitschek International Airport in Brazil. Following the show at Nilson Nelson Arena, the aircraft flew to Fortaleza, Brazil, for a concert on March 24, and on from there to Sao Paulo, then New York and the first stop of the North American leg of the tour, where it resumed its role as “the world’s biggest flying billboard,” says Dickinson. “The reaction to it everywhere it lands and everywhere we go is crazy, it’s bigger than presidential! It really is. So you have to make sure you don’t do too many ‘thumpers’ on landing because everyone is taking pictures of the blue clouds of smoke coming off the rubber!”
The “Book of Souls” world tour concludes in Germany in early August, though the band is expected to part company with "Ed Force One" after its June 17 concert in Gothenburg, Sweden, when the 747 will return to Air Atlanta. Thereafter, the tour is centered solely on Europe where the logistics no longer justify the use of the aircraft.