LOADING EQUIPMENT THE KNOWLEDGE CENTRE
In each issue of Cargo Supermarket, Vladimir Vyshemirsky, Head of Volga-Dnepr’s Engineering & Logistics Centre shares the expertise he has gained over many years of planning complex cargo transportations all over the world. In his latest article he discusses the special loading systems the airline has developed for its An-124 fleet to maximise its cargo-carrying capabilities and ensure the best solutions for customers all over the world.
SYSTEMS SOLUTIONS
UNIQUE EQUIPMENT FOR UNIQUE TASKS
Can a person climb the highest mountain on our planet, Mount Everest, or dive to the depth of the sea? It is a rhetoric question. Certainly, a well-trained person can do it. But could this well-trained person do such things without special equipment? For example, can even an experienced alpinist conquer a mountain peak dressed in shorts and flip-flops? Well, they would do for a little hill, but climbing a high mountain is unthinkable without using special equipment.
The same question can be applied to cargo aircraft. Can a cargo plane fly without loading equipment? It certainly can. But can such an aircraft perform its main function of transporting cargoes? No, it can’t. There is a saying that where there’s demand, there’s supply. I think it has been quite the contrary in the case of the An- 124 and An-225 aircraft. The emergence of these aircraft models created a supply of transporting cargo of the dimension and size which was hard to imagine before. Could it be achieved with merely standard
loading equipment that comes installed in every aircraft? No, it would be impossible.
I will try to explain it using specific examples. As I discussed in the previous issue of Cargo Supermarket, cargo aircraft have loading equipment and airports have infrastructure to enable air cargo carriage operations. Aircraft-borne cranes on the An-124 allow for the picking up of cargoes weighing up to 20 tons from a trailer or the runway and placing them into the cargo compartment, and on-board hoists make it possible to load non-self-propelled
wheeled or caterpillar-carried vehicles. It stands to reason that this is great news. But for just a moment, imagine a trailer 20m long, 2.5m wide and 4.2m high that needs to be transported. Will it fit into the Ruslan’s cargo compartment? Yes, it will. What about moving it there and the free room inside the cargo compartment? The matter is that to enable cargo loading via the front cargo door the aircraft will “squat”(kneel) onto the auxiliary legs by retracting the nose (front) landing gear. The angle between the cargo compartment floor and the airfield
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