Twenty-eight 7.5 metre cypress trees have arrived in the Uzbekistan capital, Tashkent, onboard one of Volga-Dnepr Airlines’ IL-76TD-90VD freighters. The trees were flown in from Brno in the Czech Republic for a landscape reconstruction project in Tashkent as part of the city’s preparations to host the 2016 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit.

The cypress trees were grown at a nursery in Germany and transported to Brno for the flight to Uzbekistan. Volga-Dnepr operated the flight on behalf of the Russian logistics company Haltec-Avia.

Vyacheslav Shakhov, sales executive of Volga-Dnepr Airlines, said: “Our customers’ main priority was to transport the trees in the shortest possible timescale. We were able to support this with a cost efficient solution because we had one of our IL-76TD-90VD freighters positioned at Brno-Tuřany Airport.

“The trees were packing inside special protective boxes that were too tall to be loaded using the aircraft’s onboard crane system so in order to avoid the costly rental of external cranes we brought our own special loading equipment from Leipzig to the Czech Republic, which enabled us to load the trees using the aircraft’s ramp and rail system and a forklift truck.”