heavy-lift Make the force go with you


Planning the safe loading and transport by air of very heavy pieces of equipment is often a complex operation requiring great precision, particularly if the cargo is a one-off shipment with its own unique features and challenges. Ruslan International, a joint venture company which manages


and markets AN-124 freighters, outlines some of the issues involved when organising such movements. “For loading, we use a special track system which basically


consists of two rails. For very heavy items like transformers, turbines or stators, for example, an external crane places the cargo onto those rails, which have rollers on them, and we then roll the cargo into the hold,” Ruslan explained. Sometimes, the height of the piece of heavy cargo to be


transported can also be an issue. “If that is the case, we can build a frame that allows the piece of equipment to hang between the rails to get it as close to the floor of the aircraft as possible.” Another vital operational aspect of shipping heavy goods by


air, Ruslan continued, is ensuring the cargo remains secured throughout the flight. “You have to ensure that there are enough access points for the chains and all that sort of thing so the cargo


Brazilian oil and gas company Petrobras. The initial conversion work will be carried out in Singapore before the unit is moved to Brazil in 2012 for final fabrication. “For that project, we believe there are going to be weekly or daily shipments by air freight, using a mixture of charter and scheduled capacity,” Bek commented. A specific example of the scale of the “large sums of money” which can be at stake when it comes to outsize air cargo movements for oil and gas industry customers is provided by Russian airline group Volga- Dnepr when it reported details of a recent charter flight by one of its B747 freighters. Working for UK


Securing the load on the main cargo deck of an AN-124 freighter


worldwide air


charter group Chapman Freeborn and its customer, Danish international forwarder Damco, Volga-Dnepr deployed an aircraft operated by its scheduled freighter service subsidiary AirBridgeCargo Airlines to fly 60 tonnes of 12-metre long pipes from Tokyo to Billund in Denmark. Volga-Dnepr explained that the pipes were needed to ensure


there was no loss of production on an oil rig involved in an exploration project in Europe’s North Sea. “Faulty machinery parts had threatened to stop production within a couple of days and


can be properly secured – we cannot have anything breaking free during the flight or it could bring down the aircraft,” Ruslan said. “A very big issue for us in that context are the G forces


experienced during the flight. This for a regular flight would be something less than one G but you do have to restrain the cargo enough to withstand higher G forces. We will always place certain requirements on the manufacturer building the skid that will be used in supporting that piece in the aircraft – it can be something like 2.3 G forwards, 1.5 G sideways and 2.5 G up.”


create losses for the oil company of US$20,000 per hour,” it stated. Volga-Dnepr added that the “complicated, long shipment” was carried using 20ft pallets and connectors and required two high- loaders for loading/unloading.


RUSLAN INTERNATIONAL The increasing diversity of heavy cargo being moved by air was highlighted by Michael Goodisman, business development manager for Ruslan International, a joint venture company which manages and markets the heavy-lift and outsize AN-124 fleets of its owners, Antonov Airlines and Volga Dnepr Airlines, as he outlined his company’s activities in the power generation sector. “We have carried all different


components for power stations – turbines, transformers, even occasionally nuclear-related equipment. A lot of it is going into either China or Central Asia, particularly landlocked areas which are difficult to reach by road if you have large pieces of equipment to move. But we have also seen heavy pieces of equipment moved by air over relatively short distances, for example from the UK into Italy, so the market is really quite diverse,” he commented. Some heavy shipments are so


Goodisman: “the market is really quite diverse”


large that they have to be moved on a series of flights. One example late last year saw Chapman Freeborn and logistics service provider Logwin collaborate on a large project to air freight pipes for a heat exchange system, weighing a total of 360 tonnes, some 13,000km from Sweden to Chile.


AIR LOGISTICS CHINA 21


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