SOUTHAMPTON FREIGHT SERVICES LTD

Forty feet in length and moving by air!

 

 

Long lengths and airfreight do not always go hand in hand as most passenger aircraft take only palletised cargo, where freight is loaded into specially designed airline pallets for ease or practicality of loading. This severely restricts the maximum allowed dimensions accepted on majority of flights and leaves few options for out-sized cargo, therefore ‘all cargo’ freighter aircraft are operated across the world to carry the larger or more challenging cargo movements.

In November 2011 we were contacted by our client, Premier Composite Technology (PCT) in Dubai, requesting assistance with a huge building project in the Middle East.

Our challenge was to move carbon fibre rods, packed into crates almost forty feet in length from various points across Europe and fly into Dubai. In addition to the carbon rods we also had multiple shipments of carbon fibre rolls, epoxy resins and curing agents.

Tim Bastow, Purchasing Manager at PCT explains;

“We had a very aggressive timescale for a project that meant we had to fly tonnes of raw materials for our composite manufacturing process rather than shipping by sea as normal.  Shipments were handled quickly with weekly collections from around the UK and Europe and a booking schedule developed to facilitate just in time deliveries to keep PCT production going”

From November 2011 until April 2012 we moved in excess of 265,000 kilos (265 tonne) by air from Europe to Dubai, some shipments in excess of 20,000 kilos at a time and more than 40 pieces were measured between 10 and 12.3 metres in length ! As you can imagine the logistics of such an operation provided our air export team, together with the load planners of our partner carriers Cargolux Airlines and Cathay Pacific Airways with quite a challenge!

 

 

 

It is difficult to envisage the size of the cargo but, as an indication, the metal aircraft pallet these crates are wrapped onto is actually 20 ft in length (6 metres)!