Dad buries £4,000 Boeing 737 in his back garden to create incredible underground bunker and party pad
Engineer Dave Billings has taken DIY to extraordinary new heights after snapping up a scrapped passenger jet on Facebook and burying it beneath his garden. Now he plans to turn it into a secret nuclear bunker, complete with a bar, toilet and party space.
A dad has taken garden DIY to ridiculous new heights after buying a Boeing 737 on Facebook for just £4,000 – and burying the massive plane beneath his lawn.
Madcap engineer Dave Billings, 45, has lowered the three-tonne fuselage of a scrapped Bmibaby Boeing 737-500 into a 14ft-deep hole at his home in Derbyshire.
But this is no ordinary garden project. The aircraft is set to become part of an incredible underground hideout, complete with a bar, secret entrance and enough supplies to keep his family going for months. Dave has spent years constructing a sprawling network of tunnels and hidden rooms beneath his property in Hilton, inspired by classic wartime escape film The Great Escape.
The ambitious bunker has already swallowed at least £50,000, with the buried jet now set to become its latest extraordinary addition. Dramatic footage shows the giant aircraft shell being winched underground by a team of helpers last month. And the entrance will be just as bizarre, with Dave planning to install a lift hidden inside a traditional red telephone box to whisk visitors down into the plane.
The dad says his eight-year-old son Oliver, an aircraft fanatic, inspired the purchase – although wife Beth was initially less impressed. "Beth did wonder why I was spending money on an old plane and said it was junk but she's coming round now," he said.
The family hideaway will have electricity, water, ventilation and a working toilet connected to the property's septic tank. Solar panels and a borehole will also help keep it running independently. Dave reckons it could become a makeshift fallout shelter if World War Three ever erupted, with enough food and drink to last three to six months.
However, he insists the project is primarily about having fun rather than preparing for the apocalypse. "I'm still building this for fun at the moment," he said, adding that he could speed things up if the threat of conflict increased.
The plane cost £4,000, but there is plenty more spending ahead, including £8,000 for concrete, £3,000 for reinforcing mesh and £2,000 for insulation. Dave, who documents the project on his YouTube channel Tornado Dave, hopes to finish by next February.
And he has a very important deadline: Beth wants it completed before their tenth wedding anniversary!