KEEPING THE US. AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY MOVING DURING CHALLENGING TIMES
During the summer of 2021, Maltacourt’s Time Critical department was tasked with supporting the recovery of a key production line fault for a significant US automotive manufacturer.
Over the course of three months, Maltacourt secured 13 charter aircrafts, 30 trucks, moving over 71 tonne and almost 4,000 cbm of equipment. The task was made increasingly challenging against the uncertainty of COVID and what was traditionally a straight forward project for our expert team turned into a project thwart with additional complications and challenges, which the Maltacourt team needed to be alive to, to ensure a seamless delivery of services.
As a result of COVID there was reduced capacity across the air market, as well as an upsurge in demand; not to mention fraudulent operators trying to profit from market uncertainty, the team had to be alert in offering a solution that was both in budget, on time and realistic. With an experienced and agile team at the helm and Time Critical Director Kennedy MacCulloch supporting, Maltacourt were able to not only source the aircrafts and all the required supply chain requirements to successfully deliver 13 chartered aircrafts to our client and avoid any critical production plant shutdowns.
“Our brief was to source an aircraft that could fly multiple rotations every seven days, thus allowing the plant not to shutdown. Due to the lack of aircraft availability, and pure freighters, the operations consisted of sourcing a B777 PAX seats out configured aircraft. With the amount of volume and tonnage, this meant cargo was cabin loaded, belly loaded and filled in overhead bins to maximise the amount of space available and deliver the right solution to our client” Kennedy MacCulloch, Director - Time Critical
Given the aircraft was not a typical freight it made load planning that much more challenging, as there was a need to comply with cabin loading restriction, whilst the team also had to arrange intra-Asia trucking movements to ensure cargo was received from multiple destinations across the region and loaded within time. Each week a new aircraft needed to sourced via various airlines, brokers and local partners to ensure demand was met and the key production line remained active and operational.
Whilst the impact of COVID set in, during peaks in the pandemic in the Asia region, charters became increasingly more challenging to manage. The latter stages of the project required multiple charters to be arranged via unique routings to ensure all crew were maintaining the appropriate COVID health & safety compliances. The Vietnamese equivalent of the Civil Aviation Authority, restricted layovers in Hanoi for crew members, meaning our team had to search for neighbouring countries to support crew layovers to make the fights manageable.
“The final few charters had to move from Penang Airport to Hanoi to drop PMC’s, then bank to Penang, where the cargo was being built, all in a 4 hour window for the charters to land, be loaded and depart – other wise crew would need to self isolate for 2 weeks and render the charters standard and operational. A true dedication to our team efforts and our Time Critical team to manage such a complex operation” Kennedy MacCulloch
The requirements embodied the true values of our Time Critical team and demonstrated the skillset Maltacourt have available to support any time critical requirement. From start to finish, Maltacourt were able to support our client. All cargo arriving on time, on budget and on schedule to ensure minimal disruption and maximum output for our client. The client made an investment of millions of dollars in Maltacourt’s capabilities to support their time critical requirement. If you need support for any time critical, urgent, must fly or sensitive cargo speak to our team today.
maltacourt.com
08454 989 555
Back to Case Studies