Hand in hand in Houston
Logistics players depend on each other. Project logisticians in particular are on the look-out for airfreight capacities these days. On 28 September the Breakbulk Americas trade fair looked at what expiring production lines, destroyed freighters and a preponderance of general cargo mean for the industry.
Belgium’s Fayçal Boumerkhoufa, the vice-president of integrated solutions at Cargolive Logistics, introduced a discussion on a “rather uncommon topic for a breakbulk fair” – airfreight project cargo.
It’s a key issue for project logisticians these days, in view of an ongoing scarcity in general of airfreight capacities, as Axel Kaldschmidt underlined, the head of the aerospace, marine and defence markets for Schenker Americas. This is because many of the large aircraft on which they rely now also open their cargo holds to ‘normal’ goods.
The difficulties have been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, with the Russian Volga-Dnepr Group disappearing from the market in spring – and with it its Boeing B747 freighters and its Antonov AN-124s.
The latter are still provided by Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines. Amnon Ehrlich, its director of sales for North American aerospace, government and defence programmes, said that it is overcoming the challenge of keeping its fleet in the air. Its five AN-124s, which were out of the country when the Russians invaded, now operate from Leipzig – two for Nato/Salis, and three on commercial routes and services.
Antonov is state-owned, giving it stability and enabling Ehrlich to confidently announce that its destroyed “AN-225 will be back!”
Airbus Beluga Transport also has an arrow in its quiver for players in the Texan and the global oil and gas markets – as not only Robert Reed, of the shipper Nabors, a provider of drilling solutions for oil and gas, was happy to hear.
Airbus Beluga Transport’s business and commercial development director Reza Faziollahi explained how currently two Beluga STs, and by the beginning of 2025 at the latest all five of them, can be considered alternatives for bow-loaders whose production is coming to an end these days. Project logistics operators have a future in the air after all.