Porter Huggins Inc.’s team of crane operators, led by Henry Wilson and Jack Bohannon, has become something of a fixture at the Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation aircraft factory in Savannah, Georgia, writes Dan McKain. Since the late 1960s, every week and a half or so, Gulfstream has been receiving a special oversized covered rail wagon that demands the team’s services.
Contained in the wagon these days are wing sets for the Gulfstream V corporate jet aircraft. The wings are manufactured under a subcontract by Vought Aircraft in Dallas and shipped to Savannah where final assembly, inspection and testing take place.
Porter Huggins Inc. (PHI) has, according to company president Leard Huggins III, combined the best talents, skills and technologies of its personnel and equipment at the Gulfstream plant. They have done so to safely extract, handle, and reposition the $3.5m wing sets for final assembly. The management of the wholly-owned subsidiary of General Dynamics seems to be satisfied with the dependability, reliability, and repeatability of the PHI team.
Long before the rail wagon arrives at the Gulfstream siding, a special temporary safety zone is set up and cleared of unnecessary people and equipment. Once the 28m long, 3.7m wide and 6m high (91ft x 12ft x 20ft) wagon arrives, the procedure is to use a crane to remove the reusable three-section roof from the specially built wagon, and set it safely aside. Each roof section weighs up to 3.5t (7,800lb). Next, the internal bracing and the two wing sections are delicately lifted from the wagon. Each is swung through 180° and lowered onto jig stands. All rigging and de-rigging is done by a Gulfstream Aerospace crew of six, supervised by Bob Biezenbos.
Until recently, PHI’s crane was positioned to make its lifts at 6am (or earlier) to deliver the wings for the day’s production. To minimise disruption, offloading the wings now happens at weekends, so they are in the building on the production line, ready for Monday morning.
Each wing set comes in two sections, carefully braced and secured side by side in the wagon. The delicate wings contain the aircraft’s 6,000 gallon fuel tanks. On arrival at Gulfstream, the wing sets are painstakingly extracted, one piece at a time, and placed on portable assembly jigs. From there, each piece is rolled into the aircraft fabrication building.
This procedure is normally done within about a 7.6m (25ft) working radius. The crane is typically working at a boom length of around 23.6m (77.5ft) with a boom angle of 67°. The swing angle when landing the wing sets is normally about 180°. Each wing measures about 19m long (62ft) and up to 5.8m (19ft) at its widest point. The wing sets are lifted vertically and then lowered to a horizontal position into the jigs. The transportation bracing, weighing up to 907kg (2,000lb) for each wing section, is then removed to be used again for another wagon-load of wings.
The 43t (94,000lb) GVW (fully loaded) Link-Belt HTC-8670LB is a fourth generation hydraulic telescopic truck crane. It has a 12.5m to 38.7m (41ft to 127ft) full power four-section boom with a quick reeve boom head, and also a 20m (67ft), two-stage offsettable, swing-away jib attachment.
A Microguard 434 rated capacity limiter is standard equipment with the HTC-8670LB. This warning system with graphic display and audible warning system has anti-two block and function limiters built-in. Operating data available includes boom length, boom angle, head height, load radius and machine configuration. It also provides allowable load, actual load, and percent of allowable load information. Presettable alarms are available for maximum and minimum boom angles, maximum tip height and maximum boom length. The alarms can be programmed to cover left and right swing positions and an operator defined area.
PHI was founded in 1960 as a construction company, says Huggins. “In 1964 the company bought and began renting out its first truck crane. In 1989 the company became a crane rental house and stopped doing construction work. A few years ago, I decided our equipment fleet needed modernising and upgrading. Our leadership team looked carefully at Grove, Krupp, Tadano, P&H, and Link-Belt. We chose the Link-Belt brand based on our findings.” He adds: “With our desire to replace our cranes with capacities larger than 50 ton and to stay with boom trucks for anything smaller than 50 ton, we selected the 70 ton (63.5t) Link-Belt hydraulic truck crane. Our repetitive operations at the Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation facility, among other places, validates that decision.
“Today, we are a construction equipment rental house that operates in about a 150 mile (240km) area north and south, and 100 miles (160km) west of our Savannah headquarters. We have about 23 cranes and boom trucks in our rental fleet. These are rented either with an operator and fully maintained or as a bare machine rental,” Huggins says.
