Project Forwarder Used Antonov AN124-100 Charters for Time-Critical Move
Project forwarder deugro was recently called into action to deliver 13 time-critical components from Italy and Belgium to Saudi Arabia.
The crucial consignment, required after a Saudi petrochemical plant had suffered a line production shutdown, was transported using an Antonov AN124-100 in three consecutive charter flights. The move was completed within a week, deugro said, minimizing costly downtime for the client.
The AN124-100 is one of the heaviest cargo aircraft on the market, with a gross payload capacity of 120 tonnes. The Ukrainian carrier currently has five AN124-100s available for commercial operations.
The components transported by deugro contained heat exchange equipment weighing a combined 252 tonnes and boasting a volume of 811 cubic metres, and included convection modules weighing more than 54 tonnes a piece.
The exchangers were picked up from a company close to Milan.
A fan casing from another supplier in the Netherlands was added to the third of the three flights during a stopover at Ostend-Bruges Airport in Belgium.
“Due to the critical schedule, an air charter solution was selected to provide the shortest transit time,” said Joost Maranus, senior project coordinator at deugro (Netherlands). “This allowed for choosing the airports of origin and destination as close as possible to the supplier locations and the plant site, and the schedule of the flights could be planned in accordance with the manufacturing schedules.”
According to deugro, the biggest challenge was securing the required aircraft in good time.
The conflict in Ukraine has severely curtailed the availability of aircraft to transport project cargo. Volga-Dnepr was one of the market’s main suppliers of combined wide-body, heavy-lift airplanes such as the B747-F, the Ilyushin IL76TD-90VD and the AN124-100. The Russian carrier has been banned from commercial flights to the US, Canada, Europe and other major markets.
The hostilities have also impacted Antonov, who have been forced to relocate to Leipzig in Germany from its headquarters at the Gostomel airbase close to Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv. Before the conflict, Antonov had seven AN124’s in operation.
“Thanks to deugro’s long-standing strategic relationship with the carriers, and despite the severe shortage of these aircraft in the view of the military conflict in Ukraine, we were able to successfully lock in the aircraft for the required dates of transportation,” said Pavel Kuznetsov, deugro’s head of air chartering.
Other challenges during the Saudi move included ensuring the in-flight conditions aboard the aircraft – including the temperature and pressure change rates – were suitable for the modules to be transported, and securing special loading ramps and external mobile cranes to handle the units.
The components arrived at King Fahd International Airport in Damman in Saudi’s Eastern Province then carried some 100 kilometres to the construction site.
Check out a video of the critical move:
PHOTOS
MAIN: Discharge operations at King Fahd Airport. CREDIT: Antonov Airlines
INSERT: Loading operations at Ostend-Bruges Airport, Belgium. CREDIT: deugro
