April 7 - Volga-Dnepr Airlines has delivered the Luch-5V and KazSat-3 telecommunications satellites from Krasnoyarsk in Russia to Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome on board its AN-124-100 freighter aricraft.
The satellites, which had a combined weight of 21 tonnes, were secured inside a special shipping container with the dimensions 14 m x 3 m x 4 m.
The container was placed onto the aircraft's loading ramp using an external crane, before the AN-124's own onboard handling system winched the satellites into the cargo hold.
Once the cargo had arrived in Kazakhstan, Volga-Dnepr delivered the satellite container back to its manufacturer in Krasnoyarsk.
"A satellite is a very high-tech, high value and delicate piece of cargo that requires special handling throughout the transportation process," explained Alexander Prokofiev, senior load planning and logistics engineer at Volga-Dnepr.
"We were required to meet an extremely tight timescale for this particular flight and had to ensure the aircraft and all of the external loading equipment we needed was ready to load the satellites as soon as they arrived at the airport from their production site in the city of Zheleznogororsk.
"The successful completion of the delivery reflected the detailed planning prior to the flight and the close cooperation with both our customer, Max-Global Foreign Logistics and the manufacturer, JSC Information Satellite Systems - Reshetnev Company," added Prokofiev.
