900-ton LTM 1750 built at midnight inside Boston Logan

No room, no daylight, no let-up in traffic

Terminal E at Boston Logan handles part of a passenger flow of more than 100,000 people a day, and the modernisation work — a new elevator bank for main contractor Suffolk Construction — had to proceed without interrupting it. Marr Crane & Rigging, subcontracted for the lifting, brought in Maxim for the heavy end of the job. Space around the terminal ruled out a conventional crane build, and the schedule ran from 15 January to 2 February 2026, through one of Boston’s harder winter spells: 28 inches of snow and windchill down to -25°F.

Assembling 299 feet of jib in mid-air

Maxim selected a Liebherr LTM 1750, a 900 US ton all-terrain, to place steel at a 375-foot radius. Erected, the crane stood roughly 130 feet above the airport’s 285-foot control tower — the largest machine ever used at the airport, according to the company. The build itself ran between midnight and 5am each morning to keep the terminal working.

The tightest part was the jib. With no ground space to lay out and pin sections in the usual way, the crew assembled all 299 feet of luffing jib in the air, working from 80-foot boom lifts.

“This was not a textbook crane build.”

— Jason Galvin, Boston Branch Manager, Maxim Crane Works

Working around the terminal

Airside and landside protocols shaped the programme as much as the crane chart did. Every lift had to be planned around continuous pedestrian and vehicle movement at the terminal frontage, and every set-up and knock-down had to leave the area clear before the morning peak. The winter conditions added their own constraints, testing both the crew and the equipment across an 18-day window.

Result

Maxim, which has worked with Marr Crane & Rigging on Boston projects for more than a decade, logged 150 man hours on the job with no safety incidents and reports that disruption to passengers was kept to a minimum through the overnight scheduling and coordination with airport operations. The company also credits the outcome to planning done well before the crane arrived — deciding how to raise a 900-ton machine in darkness, in snow, on a live airfield apron.

Source: Maxim Crane Works — Photos: Maxim Crane Works