Brunel Air Cargo Services Ltd a global freight forwarding company specialising in Aerospace & Defence have recently handled an A.O.G. Shipment for one of its clients who had an aircraft positioned in St. Petersburg airport with an engine failure.
Scenario
Our client had an A.O.G. situation with one of its Boeing 737-400 aircraft in St. Petersburg airport, where the aircraft had been positioned for a couple of days with an unserviceable CFM56 aircraft engine.
The Brunel A.O.G. team leapt into action and provided the client with an aircraft charter solution from Stansted airport to St. Petersburg airport utilising an Antonov AN-12 aircraft, the client had been looking for options to procure a serviceable CFM56 aircraft engine from the UK to be sent by road freight from the UK to Russia, but due to the conflicting customs issues they had to find an alternative route via air freight.
Challenge
We loaded onto the charter 20:00 GMT , the flight departed on-time and arrived into St. Petersburg airport at 00:00 GMT ready for customs clearance.
The engineers then switched old with new, part of our agreement with the charter was that we had the aircraft to also move the unserviceable engine back to the leasing company in Belgium utilising the same AN-12 for the initial charter. So once the old engine had been removed and securely loaded we then moved from St. Petersburg airport to Brussels airport, we undertook the customs clearance, storage, handling and onward delivery to the leasing company in Belgium.
Solution
The team had worked hard to arrange the project so that it was within the clients budget. By using a combination of internal and external resources, Brunel were able to provide all import and export services at 17% below the clients actual budget.
With a process which included handling Russian customs as well as having to transport the faulty engine back to the supplier in Belgium, it was a costly process but one in which we had the clients aircraft back in full service within 12 hours.
This saved our client both lost opportunity costs as well as preserving and promoting excellent customer service to their end clients.