Meeting tough deadlines often requires out-of-the-box thinking – which sometimes means landing a helicopter in an automobile manufacturer’s car park located next to its production plant to ensure there are no disruptions.
That was the case when the Chapman Freeborn broker team in Germany received an urgent cargo enquiry to transport a delicate 600kg package of automobile parts urgently to a production line at a plant in Mühlheim an der Ruhr. The customer couldn’t wait the three hours it would take to transport the cargo from Frankfurt Airport where it had arrived from China, and the nearest airport to the plant was still an hour away. A charter cargo plane would therefore not be the quickest solution this time.
An EC145 Eurocopter was therefore positioned at Egelsbach airport, fifteen minutes away from Frankfurt International Airport, landed in the employee car park next to the production plant, and with centimetres to spare, the fragile 600kg pallet was flown straight to the plant.