Volga-Dnepr Airlines is continuing to see an upturn in the movement of oil and gas cargoes, including its latest delivery of pump and vaporizer skids to Seoul, South Korea.

Operated on behalf of Air Charter Service France for its customer, Heppner Transport & Logistics, one of Volga-Dnepr’s An-124-100 freighters transported the cargo from Switzerland’s EuroAirport Basle-Mulhouse Freiburg to Seoul’s Incheon International Airport. The shipment, which included two pieces both weighing 21.5 tons and two weighing 16 tons each, was loaded using the An-124-100’s onboard crane system.

The shipper prepared special wooden frames to fit underneath the 16-ton pieces to help with the loading process, which took three hours to complete.

“The loading of this cargo needed meticulous preparation with the Volga-Dnepr Team,” said Alexandre Busila, Cargo Director of Air Charter Service France. “Thanks to our joint work the flight was a real success. This charter project shows that the oil and gas industry is still doing well.”

Volga-Dnepr Airlines has over 26 years of experience of delivering heavyweight and outsize cargoes for customers in the oil and gas industry. To date, it has operated over 1,430 flights delivering over 94,000 tons of oil and gas shipments to Europe, Russia and the CIS, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Cargoes carried have included drilling equipment, pumps, power houses, blowout preventers, tube bundles, pipeline valves, compressors and heat exchangers.

Crude oil prices have increased by over 40 percent in the last year and are forecast to rise further in 2017, leading energy companies to ramp up exploration and drilling activities.