The bearing ring, for a mining machine, weighed in at only 12 tons including its steel transport cradle; this is only 10% of the aircraft's payload capability. However, its 6.74 meter diameter created a new challenge. The nose door opening of the An-124 is only 6.4m wide at floor level; so the load appeared too big even for this giant freighter.
Ruslan International organized the movement for STL Logistics and Panalpina using one of the aircraft belonging to its partner Volga Dnepr.
Armed with a precise scale drawing from the shipper, Ruslan International's loading engineer Dmytro Kurko went to work to address the problem. His solution was to design and build a custom cradle which would allow the bearing ring to be loaded at an angle of exactly 20.1 degrees from horizontal. Even then, the CAD (computer-aided design) study predicted clearances of just 48mm and 61mm.
The painstaking loading process took several hours; but all went to plan, and the flight successfully operated from Dusseldorf to arrive on schedule in Port Hedland, Western Australia. Unloading was an equally careful reversal of the loading process.
Says Paul Furlonger, Sales Director of Ruslan International: 'When we first saw the details of this shipment, the immediate reaction was that it wouldn't fit. But we're accustomed to achieving the seemingly impossible, and our team performed their usual magic - resulting in another successful job.'
