Our team at UCARGO has worked on Air Cargo forwarding projects of all shapes and sizes for various different industries, so was adept and confident at dealing with this enquiry when the client approached us for quoting.

The inquiry came into our phone line on a Sunday afternoon, due to our ability to be on call 24/7, the project was picked up that day.

The new client required a quote for moving a large piece of machinery (around 20 tonnes) from their manufacturing plant in Yorkshire to travel by air to China where its final destination was a car production plant. The project turnaround time was 4 weeks to complete, and the client’s managing director was putting pressure on our initial contact to have costs ready for evaluation the following Monday afternoon, leaving just 24 hours to put our quote together. The immediate difficulty was that this was a Sunday afternoon so suppliers needed to be contacted out of hours on a Sunday.

Our director traveled to UCARGO’s nearby offices to start work on this quote on the Sunday afternoon and evaluated they would be moving a machine that would total 21,440kgs. This was the first time this client had moved machinery to China in their 200 year history. The first thing to establish was a contact with a packing company as well as our agents in China. The packing company we contacted had previous experience with this client so were swift and knowledgeable of what was required and were able to put together a fairly accurate pricing structure by the Sunday evening. By the following morning we had been speaking to our agents in China late into the evening and were able have an indication of both freight and local charges presented to the customer by Monday afternoon as promised.

After the costs were presented, we arranged with the client to come to their office in Yorkshire on Wednesday, also inviting the packing company, where we could evaluate the machinery together. It was established after the meeting that the project would be a little more complicated than first realised due to the nature of the equipment, its weight, and size.

Over the course of the next ten days, we worked with the packing company, the client, and the aircraft carrier to plan the freight from this cargo. Working with technical cad drawings, and the masters of the aircraft to get approval to carry the cargo, which took a few attempts to clear, and involved packing the machine into 4 pieces (the largest piece came in at 19 tonnes and dimensions of 464 x 317 x 279cm), the machine pieces required steel beams, as well as shackles for tying down in aircraft. (Pictures are available) After these modifications were made with the carrier and packing company it was approved for flight and space was booked.

Once ready, the machine traveled on a low bed trailer to Luxembourg where the flight was leaving from and we traveled with the packing company to oversee the loading on the Thursday before Easter. Cargo was loaded with inches to spare, and it arrived at Zhengzhou Xinzheng International Airport the following morning, customs cleared and traveled locally on a low bed trailer to arrive at the final destination at the agreed time.