AN-124 utilised for CNC machinery transport

Antonov Airlines and RXO Air Transport have transported high-tech CNC machinery from Milan, Italy to Hamilton, Canada on board one of the airline’s AN-124-100 aircraft.

The cargo has a total weight 169 tons and consisted of five pieces including three machines in plastic cover with dimensions 940 x 300 x 370 сm and smaller wooden cases.

For onloading and offloading the cargo, two external cranes were used in conjunction with the airline’s in-house ramp system.

The high-tech CNC machinery will be used in automotive manufacturing of electric vehicle parts.

Olha Danylova, commercial executive, Antonov Airlines, said: “The peculiarity of CNC machinery is its dimensions – it is narrow and high. Therefore, to put it on the loading ramp and secure it inside the aircraft it was necessary to design a special transport frame.

“The frame had to be universal to use it for the series of scheduled flights. [Being] lightweight was the vital requirement for the frame due to the limited payload for transatlantic air transportation.”

Manager of heavy-lift transport for RXO Russell Means and national account manager John Beltsos arranged the operations with RXO’s customer and were on-site supervising the offload and delivery to the customer.