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The growing traffic between Asia and South America is encouraging smaller airports in the region, such as MidAmerica St Louis and Chicago Rockford, to join the cargo race. Correspondent Ian Putzger reports on where the airports stand in the battle for Asia-Latin freight

Airports in the US Midwest and in the south are trying to position themselves as gateways for the growing volumes of air cargo moving between Asia and Latin America.

According to Larry Taylor, head of business development at MidAmerica St Louis Airport, the existing set-up is not suited for flows between the two regions. Los Angeles serves as a transit point for some of this traffic, but the lion’s share moves over Miami, the main gateway for airfreight to and from Latin America.

“Cargo from Asia lands in the US, trucks to Miami and waits in the rain for a flight south,” he said.

The operators of MidAmerica St Louis see an opening there for their airport to fill and develop its commercial potential. MidAmerica is the commercial side of a US Air Force Base. Under a joint use agreement with the military, both share the airport’s 8,000 and 10,000 ft runways, the latter designated chiefly for MidAmerica’s traffic.

The airport has mounted a sustained campaign to attract Asian airlines, but so far these efforts have not produced a commitment for flights. It fared better with the quest for a southern link.

A year ago Miami-based all-cargo carrier Arrow Air started weekly flights between Bogota and the airport with DC-10 aircraft. The operation has been supported by Teqflor, a flower import and distribution company based in Miami. Northbound traffic has been mostly flowers - Colombia’s top air export.

In the absence of direct Asian links, southbound cargo out of MidAmerica consists mostly of US exports from the Midwest, supplemented with some Asian traffic trucked in from Chicago.

Houston’s Bush Inter-continental Airport has Asian freighter links through China Airlines, EVA Air and Cathay Pacific and passenger flights to Latin America but no southbound freighter connection at this moment.

Genaro Pena, the airport’s director of marketing, looks to change this with the help of a new cool chain operation at Houston. Tradewinds Cargo Handling signed a lease in August to operate a cold storage facility at the airport starting on November 1.

Pena regards the cooler operation as a catalyst for the development of maindeck service to Latin America and intends to mount a marketing campaign shortly. “We look to interline with Asian carriers. We’re not just a distribution point for the southeastern US,” he declared.

Another airport that sees a future as an intercontinental freighter connection point is Chicago Rockford International Airport. Located 103 km northwest of Chicago, Rockford has been designated by several airlines to be their diversionary airport in case of problems at Chicago O’Hare, and the airport authority is pushing for regular all-cargo flights.

“We’re only 58 nautical miles from O’Hare. You couldn’t get closer and still have independent airspace,” said Kenneth Ryan, Rockford’s director of cargo. He added that trucking between the two airports takes 75 minutes on a direct trunk road.

With slots and capacity in tight supply at O’Hare, freighters will have to look for alternative points to serve the Chicago area, he reckons. To underscore its ambition, Rockford added a 72,000 sq ft warehouse supported by an eight-acre ramp this year, which brought its total cargo area to 800,000 sq ft of warehouse space

The airport already has a hub role for domestic air cargo flows. It currently ranks 19th in the US airports cargo hierarchy, thanks to UPS, which has its second-largest US hub there since the mid-1990s. Unlike O’Hare, its smaller neighbour has never been closed due to snow, according to Rockford chief executive officer Bob O’Brien.

In Taylor’s opinion, unruffled operating conditions are more crucial for an interline point connecting intercontinental flows than the cargo demand in its catchment area. He pointed to the integrator hubs at Louisville and Memphis. Like MidAmerica, they are located “below the ice and above the hurricanes”, he said.

After 38 flights the Bogota-MidAmerica flights were suspended at the advent of a historical slow period in US flower imports. They are expected to resume this month.

Source: Cargo News Asia

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