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Rising from the ashes

As Europe’s air space was under the grip of the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud IFLN Members Interglobo Transunion and Fiege worked round the clock to secure the shipment of pharmaceutical goods from Switzerland to the Asia Pacific region earlier this month.

“Organising a full charter flight when most aircraft were grounded was a tremendous challenge,” said Markus Warnebold, head of the Fiege Air + Ocean group and Daniel Thoma, station manager at Fiege Basle airport.

In a joint effort with Bruno Liotta, managing director of the Interglobo-Transunion Group, an MD 11 was finally secured taking off from Liège in Belgium.

This meant that several trucks had to be hired to transport the perishable cargo weighing approximately 46,000 kg from Basle to Liège airport.

Seeing the plane take off bound for Singapore was a great relief to everyone involved.

“Of course, we all kept our fingers crossed that the weather was holding for that critical first part of the journey,” said Warnebold.

With the consignment being stuck in Europe for couple of days both IFLN Members literally had to pull at the stops and hope that all would turn out well in the end.

Another challenge, particularly under tropical conditions, was that the cargo had to be kept under temperature control ranging between +15deg C without exceeding +25deg C.

As soon as the consignment arrived in Singapore it had to be broken down into smaller shipments for 11 different destinations in the Asia Pacific region, with Alex Teo from Interglobo Transunion having to sort through and divide the packages inside a cold store.