NEWS FROM FREIGHT
HANDLERS GLOBALLY CARGO SHORTS
AIRLINE BRIEFS NEWS FROM AROUND
AIRPORT V 30 OICE, DECEMBER 2021
THE AIR INDUSTRY
Afghanistan Rescue
47 American citizens, legal residents
were rescued from Afghanistan
and brought to Terminal 4 at JFK Airport
under secrecy last week by Emirates
Airlines through the efforts of
Project Dynamo. A team of volunteers
went into Taliban controlled areas to
retrieve the stranded people.
Redevelopment
In mid-December, both Terminal One
and Terminal JFKIAT made major JFK
redevelopment announcements; A New
Terminal One signed a lease with the
Port Authority for redevelopment of a
major new terminal while T$ announced
its increasing partnership with Delta in
the $1.5 billion terminal expansion.
PANYNJ projects a steep trajectory
for return to flying in NY. This meshes
with airline executives who are bullish
on big increases in domestic passenger
traffic with increased business
class usage throughout 2022.
International travel popped in November
and still shows good signs of
growth despite the covid variants.
United SAF
Airbus SE delivered 58 jets in November,
setting up a busy final month
of 2021 as the company aims to ship
600 aircraft this year. The tally leaves
the plane maker 82 aircraft short of its
annual target with just weeks to go.
Bloomberg News reported last week
that the company needed to accelerate
jetliner deliveries in December to
meet its goal.
Swiss Air
Swiss Air will be moving from Terminal
4 to Terminal One at JFK Airport
to be closer to its sister airlines Lufthansa
and Brussels. There will be a
continuing shuffle of airlines and terminals
as the terminal redevelopment
gets under way.
Avianca re-org
Avianca recently announced that
it has successfully completed its financial
restructuring process and
emerged from Chapter 11 as a more
efficient and financially stronger airline,
with significantly reduced debt
and over $1 billion of liquidity.
AA+indiGo
American Airlines is in the process
of getting requisite approvals from
the US government for its codeshare
agreement with IndiGo airlines and the
partnership is likely to implemented by
March 2022. The last time AA had a
direct flight to India was 10 years ago.
Irish Ayes
JetBlue and Aer Lingus Expand
Codeshare Partnership Across the
North Atlantic With More Ways to Book
Travel Between the U.S. and Ireland
AA routes
American Airlines is moving rapidly
to meet growing demand by resuming
13 international routes next year from
its hubs in Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas/
Fort Worth, Charlotte, Phoenix,
and New York. The routes are mostly
to Europe — though one will go to Asia
— and have not flown since 2019 or
ceased during the onset of the pandemic.
Planes built
Boeing and Airbus delivered 85 and
127 commercial jets in the third quarter
of 2021, compared to 28 and 145
deliveries, respectively, in Q3 2020.
Year-to-date as of September 30, Boeing
and Airbus delivered 241 and 424
aircraft, compared to 98 and 341 in the
first nine months of 2020.
For the full year 2020, Boeing delivered
157 aircraft, compared to 380
and 806 in 2019 and 2018, respectively.
In 2020, Airbus delivered 566
aircraft and won the deliveries crown
for the second year in a row. Due to
COVID-19, deliveries were down from
863 and 800 in 2019 and 2018, respectively.
Airbus is expected to retain the
deliveries crown for years to come due
to the company’s comfortable backlog
lead over its American rival. Prior to
2019, Boeing had out-delivered Airbus
every year since 2012.
Space still needed for
cargo at NY airports
Covid has turned the cargo world upside
down. With the on and off factory output
in China, the tremendous flow of good
by sea has ended up in totally congested
in Western U.S. ports. To expedite the
shipment of seasonal goods many buyers
have been using air cargo. Consequently,
the busy port of JFK has been overwhelmed
by regular cargo flights, trucker
flights of goods from other airports destined
for JFK, cargo-in cabin flights and
ad-hoc flights putting pressure on cargo
handling companies, warehouses, truckers
and related vendors. As a frame of reference,
Airlines, through belly cargo and
cargo-in-cabin, transport over 52 million
metric tons of goods a year, representing
more than 35% of global trade by value
but less than 1% of world trade by volume.
That is equivalent to $6.8 trillion worth of
goods annually, or $18.6 billion worth of
goods every day.
To ease the condition of overcrowding
by unprecedented additional shipments,
ground handlers are seeking additional
space to handle and temporarily store
goods until truckers can pick them up. Another
plan to ease this condition is in place
for JFK by Worldwide Flight Services that
is starting a dock management system to
make deliveries and pick-up more streamlined
and reservation based. This pilot began
recently began. Usage and feedback
from the community will allow for further
rollout and usage by other cargo handling
companies, broker and trucking firms.
The overwhelming pressure from the
abundance of cargo handling has been
documented since May of 2021 but has
reached disruptive levels for the past
three months. According to a cargo association,
the US air cargo import supply
chain has been unable to handle a huge
increase in demand this year, prompting
forwarders to seek out alternative entry
points to avoid the bottlenecks. Supply
chain disruptions and the resulting delivery
delays have led to long supplier delivery
times,” the association said. “This
typically results in manufacturers using air
transport, which is quicker, to recover time
lost during the production process.”
AirFrance/KLM freighters
Air France is purchasing 4 Airbus
A350F freighter aircraft, with the option for
4 additional aircraft. Cargo to move from
C-I-C to freighters. Boosting AF/KLM capacity
and boost shipments into JFK.
WFS acquisition
WFS has been on an acquisition spree
and it is believed that it will continue with
with rumored acquisition of
Mercury Air Cargo, the largest air
cargo handler for 60 years at LAX, SFO
and SIC airports.
This follows the September acquisitions
of IAS Logistics DFW, LLC (d/b/a
“Pinnacle Logistics”), a leading provider
of cargo handling services in the United
States headquartered in Fort Worth,
Texas, Pinnacle Logistics and the Paris
based handler R.A. Hand.
MNG to JFK
MNG Airlines has launched a three
times a week freighter service between
Germany’s Cologne Bonn airport and
New York’s JFK hub. Turkey-based MNG
operated a recently converted Airbus
A330-300 freighter for the inaugural JFK
flight. The JFK service expands MNG’s
freighter schedule at Cologne Bonn, a six
times a week service to Istanbul.
Mena Cargo/Unilode
MENA Cargo Airlines has signed a
five-year unit load device (ULD) supply,
management and repair agreement with
Unilode Aviation Solutions. MENA Cargo
was established in 2020 as a brand under
MAE Aircraft Management WLL, which
is part of MENA Aerospace Enterprises
WLL. MENA Cargo is based in Bahrain,
and provides scheduled as well as charter
air freight services across underserved
markets in the Middle East, Africa and
South Asia
On the Omicron fallout
“Restrictions will not stop the spread
of Omicron. Along with urgently reversing
these policy mistakes, the focus of governments
should be squarely on ensuring
the integrity of supply chains and increasing
the distribution of vaccines.”