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 ?m 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.”

RXO Air Transport’s senior manager, international/heavylift, John Beltsos and director of national account management John Beltsos arranged the operations with RXO’s customer and were on-site supervising the offload and delivery to the customer. 

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