14,400 kilometres, 53 days and 4 different ships: it took a few strokes of logistical genius to transport a mobile crane to its destination on Earth’s southernmost continent. This is how it all began.
It’s December, 21st 2017. Three days before the Christmas holiday, Schmidbauer, a system service provider of crane technologies, receives an order approval from the German Aerospace Centre (DLR): one Liebherr LTM 1040-2.1 mobile crane is to be transported to Antarctica to help redevelop a polar research station.
Since options for transporting equipment to Antarctica are extremely limited, the crane needed to be shipped within just two weeks. ‘ Otherwise we would have lost a whole year. Despite the difficult conditions, it was clear to us that a delay was not an option’, explains Minka St. James, who managed the Antarctica project at Schmidbauer.
Find out why the crane had to be disassembled with the help of Liebherr customer service into individual parts weighing a maximum of 8 tons and how two crane experts experienced assembly in the eternal ice in this story.