A Unimog U 427 is equipped for winter road clearance at the world’s largest DHL hub.
A Unimog is responsible for ensuring that every child – big or small – gets their Christmas present in time. More specifically, a U 427 in Ginster Yellow. Let us begin at the beginning:
A logistical challenge.
Leipzig Airport is DHL’s European hub. So if Aunt Theresa from Madrid sends her nephew George a Christmas present with DHL Express to London, the package first lands in Leipzig. Like millions of other cargo items, it is transshipped here and transported to London by another DHL aircraft. This all happens at night when Theresa and George are asleep dreaming about Christmas.
Hero in the snow chaos.
To ensure that the various DHL cargo planes Airbus and Boeing) are in perfect working order, the European Air Transport Leipzig GmbH (EAT) team takes care of their maintenance and repair. The company is also an airline and operates over 30 of its own cargo aircraft.
And this is where the Unimog comes into play. “The last two winters were very snowy at our airport in Schkeuditz,” says Olaf Andreas, Manager Ground Support. „There was suddenly so much snow that the airport operator‘s clearance vehicles were not able to clear the areas in front of our hangars. They were simply overloaded. Our doors were iced up and the machines suffered unnecessary downtimes as we could neither carry them out of the hall nor carry them in.“
