In just seven days, deugro Netherlands, in cooperation with deugro Italy, deugro Saudi Arabia, and deugro Air Chartering, successfully delivered 13 plant components to a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia using three AN-124-100 air charter flights. The delivery was time-critical due to a production line shutdown, and deugro was able to complete the project quickly to minimize costly downtime.
The cargo included heat exchange equipment with a total volume of 811 cubic meters and a total weight of 252,216 kilograms, including convection modules with dimensions of 1,100 x 310 x 340 centimeters and weighing 54,500 kilograms. The main scope of the shipment, the heat exchanger modules, was picked up from a supplier in Italy near Milan, while the plant operator requested another delivery of a fan casing from a supplier in the Netherlands, which was added 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 possible. The airports of origin and destination were chosen to be as close as possible to the supplier locations and the plant site, and the flights were scheduled according to manufacturing schedules.
The AN-124-100 aircraft was required to transport the heat exchanger modules due to their size, but the heavy lift market had been impacted by the military conflict in Ukraine, resulting in a shortage of AN-124 aircraft. However, thanks to deugro’s long-standing strategic relationship with carriers, they were able to secure the required aircraft for the transportation.
Several technical challenges were successfully handled by the deugro team to ensure a safe transport. The cargo hold of an AN-124-100 is not fully pressurized, so the in-flight conditions were carefully checked to ensure that they were suitable for the modules to be transported. Furthermore, some modules were too heavy to be lifted with the onboard crane, so loading and offloading had to be executed using the carrier’s special loading ramps and external mobile cranes.
Upon arrival at King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, the individual flights were quickly unloaded, taking an average of three to five hours per aircraft.
