LOADING EQUIPMENT
‘What should we do when there are no such elements in the cargo or the distance between them does not coincide with the location of the load-bearing elements in the compartment floor? Turn down the transportation order? Certainly not! In this case we either use our wonderful platforms to carry and distribute weight, or design transportation frames for this particular cargo to ensure safe and reliable transportation.’
Now there’s only one thing left to do. With the help of one or two mobile cranes the cargo is placed onto the skate beams. Then the cables of the aircraft’s loading winches are connected to the cargo and the cargo is rolled into the cargo compartment over the skate beams. The skates allow us to move cargo with the carriers with very little friction coefficient, and the tracking segments direct the movement and partly help distribute weight.
Everything seems simple, but it is not so easy. Under the cargo compartment floor there are load-bearing elements that resist the cargo weight. They are positioned within a certain distance from each other symmetrically to the central axis. We can use skate beams if there are longitudinal load-bearing elements in the base of the cargo. Moreover, it is preferable that the tracking distance of the cargo falls on the load-bearing elements under the floor surface. Our readers with some experience of transporting heavy cargo with our help may have noticed that our engineers always ask about the location of load bearing elements in the base of the cargo when processing such orders.
What should we do when there are no such elements in the cargo or the distance between them does not coincide with the location of the load-bearing elements in the compartment floor? Turn down the
transportation order? Certainly not! In this case we either use our wonderful platforms to carry and distribute weight, or design transportation frames for this particular cargo to ensure safe and reliable transportation.
The many years’ working experience of Volga-Dnepr Airlines shows that if cargo dimensions and weight allow its placing inside the aircraft cargo compartment, there is always an engineering solution to be found that enables transportation of such cargo despite minimal clearance, overloading and other technical issues. Yet that is possible only on condition of the mutual willingness and trust of our customers.
You may have noticed that speaking of the special loading set I mentioned it as singular, not plural, even though we have many sets of such equipment. Our designers do not waste their time and have consistently improved the equipment by developing and implementing many variants of it. The only thing left unchanged is the modular principle of building such sets. It ensures that any elements of the equipment are compatible.
The result is somewhat similar to a set of children’s building blocks. For example, you buy a set of Lego blocks for your child and the manual book shows you how to use the elements of this particular set to build a toy car. The child will build it, and
probably even quicker than you do it! Then the child will take it apart and begin building something completely different, this time using his or her own fantasy as guidance. Almost the same can be done to our loading equipment set – you can assemble the best variant for every particular case. In this way, overpasses for rolling wheeled vehicles inside the compartment can be used for loading heavy cargo. The only change to be made is to put cargo carriers onto them. Skate beams are used with both a low profile tracking system without rail slippers, and with rail slipper elements as well. Protective plating can be put under the tracking segments for additional and improved distribution of weight. All platform types can be used with any type of equipment and so on.
The modular principle of creating special loading equipment allows us to adjust our equipment to specific cargo needs of our customers instead of asking them to modify their cargo parameters to suit our abilities.
Besides, our special loading equipment has been unified and standardised to such a degree that we even use it with a different type of aircraft, the IL-76.
Yet I’m afraid I have already bored you to death! So I suggest we talk about transportation of cargo with our Ilyushin aircraft next time.
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