Airbus wings meet air draught challenge
Airbus 380 fuselage navigates the Garonne river.
Although the Eurozone may be facing its difficulties, the cross-Europe marine ‘conveyorbelt’ of components for the A380 Airbus is still going strong despite a clash between the ancient and modern worlds at its inception.
Running for the best part of the last ten years, it is now a forgone conclusion that A380 parts travel by water. However, when Keel Marine was originally approached to find the best way of bringing these components together, “they thought research would prove that shipping by air was going to be the way forward”, explained the company’s Paul Readl.
“There were two problems with this,” he continued. “Either you built a truly huge plane to encompass the already large airbus components, or you broke the parts down into very small pieces, leaving a headache at the end. However, we proved that crossing by water wasn’t only cost effective, it was efficient, as schedules could be kept up and parts like the wings, which came in from the UK, could be delivered in one piece.”
However, there were issues. One of the most notable was the tight parameters laid by a historic bridge and another was the fact that the airbus components could not be lifted by crane. Any stresses on them had to be accounted for, and a simple bump would have meant sending the wings back to the factory for checking.
So, Keel got the job of designing a river craft with an integrated lift platform for transporting the components from Trompaloupe on the estuary of the Gironde, inland to Langon, on the river Garonne in France.
This has its challenges, including air draft and beam restrictions under bridges as well as limited channel depths. In addition, vessels are required to minimise river bed disturbance, excessive wash and noise.
Worse still, the vessel was to operate all year round and the river conditions could be severe in places such as the historic Pont du Pierre, as channel dynamics quicken the water flow under the Napoleonic bridge. Things were always going to be tight and final clearance could be measured in a couple of hundred millimetres.
The design centred on a multi-wheeled lorry setting down a bed, with the wings laid out on it onto a specially adapted barge deck. The legs of the bed take the weight, and the lorry drives out from underneath.
Then a flap arrangement retracts, and the entire bed is lowered by a hydraulic winch so the legs sit right down into the hull through cut-out sections in the flooring. This is necessary to make the few inches of air draft clearance.
And because the bridge is an old fashioned ‘arch and key stone’ shape, there are two DP units on either end of the barge to make sure that the wings make it through the dead centre of the bridge, despite the wash, with no actual clash between ancient and modern worlds.
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