Week of March 24, 1997
Volga-Dnepr - Cargo Carrier ExtraordinaireThe point of growth The general decline in the Russian aviation industry over the last six years does not apply to the transportation of cargo. Last year the volume of cargo traffic increased by 33%, and the rise is expected to continue in the future. The increase comes mainly from charter flights abroad and selling unique capabilities of dedicated Russian cargo aircraft on the international market. There are two leading operators working in this sector, Aeroflot - Russian International Airlines, or, better, its branch Aeroflot-Cargo, and Volga Dnepr. The two carriers, however, occupy their own niches so that the competition between them occurs mainly in numbers - in 1996 Aeroflot and Volga Dnepr carried roughly 85,000 t and 45,103 t of cargo, respectively.
The unique planeWhile Aeroflot carries the bulk of its cargo in the appropriate compartments of its passenger airliners, Volga Dnepr is a specialist operator of the world's biggest airlifter, the An-124 Ruslan. The company's inventory consists of 7 An-124-100s (a seventh was acquired in September of last year), 3 Il-76TDs, one An-12, one An-32 and a Yak-40VIP. Although Volga Dnepr possesses roughly 30% of all Ruslans in commercial service, in 1996 the operator provided almost 65% of this plane's services on the market. The volume of contracts for the company's An-124 last year amounted to US $101.5 million. The seven aircraft spent 8,263 hours in the air and carried 40,085 t of cargo.
 Created by the Antonov design bureau under the appropriate order from the Soviet Defence Ministry, the An-124 has successfully worked on the civil market for unique bulky cargo since 1989. Having a cargo cabin volume of 1,270 cubic meters, the 390-tonne giant is able to transport 120 t of freight 4,800 km or 80 t 8,400 km at a speed of 800 kmh with an hourly fuel consumption of 10 t. The Ruslan is a very advanced aircraft with its 34 on-board computers, fly-by-wire control system with a redundancy factor of four, supercritical airfoils and high-bypass D-18T engines. The An-124 holds 21 various world's records.
Illustrating this point Aleksei Isaikin says that since April 1994 VolgaDnepr's Ruslans have routinely carried PW4048 engines for Boeing 777s from Connecticut to Seattle. "The US inner transportation market is sealed with seven seals to foreign operators," he states, "except for us. This is so because the An-124 has become an essential and irreplaceable part in the mechanism of the US and Western Europe industries." According to Isaikin, North America's share in VolgaDnepr's business is 30%. With a little exception in the shape of humanitarian supplies, the majority of Ruslan sorties are devoted to transportation of high-tech products like aero-engines, spacecraft, oil equipment, power generation units, compact production lines etc.
The work doneAmong bulky cargo that Ruslans have successfully transported were 90-t hydraulic turbines, Libcher cranes, Yulky trucks, a Tu-204 fuselage, a 109-t locomotive, the Ferretty marine yacht (27 t, sized 17 x 5 x 4.4 m), a nuclear reactor for an orbital space station, a 104-t Ford production line and a 81-t Coca-Cola modular factory. But the most unusual operation of all took place in May 1992, when a Volga-Dnepr's An-124 transported 52 t of gold worth Pound Sterling 230 m from United Arab Emirates to Switzerland.In 1996 Volga Dnepr, in tough competition with another Ruslan user, the Antonov design bureau, won a contract from the world's biggest oil company for transportation of bulky oil equipment to Columbia, including 98-t monoblocks. "We won because we offered better loading/unloading technology and a better timetable," Isaikin says. To satisfy the customer, it was necessary to provide regular flights on several aircraft and Volga-Dnepr managed it. "The equipment was put in place quicker than the client had originally planned, and this resulted in an additional profit worth several dozen million dollars," Isaikin adds proudly. The most difficult thing in the whole project was to provide safe landings and take-offs from a short airstrip high in the mountains. In total, Ruslans made nearly a hundred sorties to this airport. The importance of this project was that the An-124 added oil companies in the list of its admirers. "The market for oil equipment transportation is very promising, and we are expecting orders from other oil and gas companies, including Russian ones," says Isaikin.
China: a new big market?The increasing trade turnover between Russia and Pacific Rim countries has brought a valuable contribution into the rise of cargo traffic registered by Russian operators. However, the An-124 is too big for regular flights to the region, therefore it is used only on special occasions. For instance, in May 1996 an An-124 brought to Shanghai from Germany a 95-t compressor."The Il-76 has proved the best plane for China," says Isaikin. Unlike their western counterparts, the Russian cargo aircraft, which were conceived as military air lifters, do not need special airport equipment and can operate from rough airfields. Isaikin foresees a sharp rise in the cargo traffic by air between China, India and Russia in the near future, which might be much bigger than a 10-15% annual increase in the international market for unique bulky cargo. The interstate protocols signed during the recent meetings between Russian premier Victor Chernomyrdin and Chinese leaders call for establishing a new cargo operator as a joint venture between the air carriers of the two countries. According to local specialists, China may need as many as 4,000 various civil aircraft, but the restricted financial abilities of the country allows for procurement of only 200 units in the next five years. "China with its poorly-equipped airports is an ideal market for Russian cargo aircraft able to operate autonomously from ground airfields," Isaikin states. He says that a typical Chinese picture is trucks and lorries of all sorts carrying sacks with consumer goods to two big centres - Beijing and Shanghai - from where they are being exported world-wide. Using Il-76s may allow deliveries of Chinese export items directly from the central provinces to foreign airports.
ConclusionAleksei Isaikin looks optimistically at the future, saying that the Chinese market alone will, hopefully, bring to Volga-Dnepr an increase in sales worth US $20 million in the current year. "The cargo aircraft sector is a point of growth in the Russian civil aviation," he states, adding that the advent of the new-generation freighters - the GE-powered An-124, An-70, Tu-204C, Il-76MF, Il-96T, Il-114T - will enable the country to keep its leading positions in the international market for cargo conveyance. | |
"During a few years we have managed to remain responsible for over 60% of all services by the An-124," says Aleksei Isaikin, General Director of Volga Dnepr. The unique aircraft has no competitors on the market today - the projected MD-17, a civil version of the C-17, will merely "supplement" the Russian-Ukrainian giant. Isaikin says that the market demand for extremely-large cargo aircraft, estimated at US $300 million of sales a year, exceeds at least by double the capabilities of the existing Ruslan fleet. "I feel that in reality the market is much bigger and rising as the world's large manufacturers recognize the merits of the plane." In a sense, the unique aircraft extends the existing demand itself by becoming wider known in the industry.
