Don’t Fence Me In: The European model – smarter, not larger
Keeping up with growing air cargo volumes moving to and from European airports required airports to make significant infrastructure investments during 2017 and into 2018.
Cologne Bonn Airport (CGN) told Air Cargo World that the airport “invested in additional ramp handling equipment [and] upgraded its airside infrastructure” during 2017. Similarly, the Leipzig/Halle Airport (LEJ) said its main challenge in 2017 was developing a strategy to face the long-term growth expected in air cargo at LEJ.
“This ongoing positive trend places special requirements on us in terms of developing personnel and also having the right general infrastructural conditions,” the airport told Air Cargo World. However, LEJ also has the major advantage of room to grow, which other airports – in Europe and other regions across the globe – do not have. Some airports – most famously, Amsterdam Schiphol Airport (AMS), which has seen the number of freighter flights decline rapidly following slot shortages that have led the airport to prioritize passenger flights. Other airports have stepped up to attract displaced freighters, but are often still challenged for space to accommodate the required infrastructure. Those airports are instead developing alternative strategies to overcome a space shortage.
The two main strategies airports are adopting to address the capacity crunch include increasing efficiency through technology adoption, and moving cargo facilities off-airport.
The second point, in particular, is the philosophy behind Liège Airport’s (LGG’s) Liège Logistics Park, which is located off the airport premises but still included as an airport facility from a customs perspective. At LGG, cargo warehouse space is at a premium, and the e-commerce shipments moving through the airport require a lot of space to sort, making on-airport sorting an inefficient use of space. That makes moving to the logistics park, dubbed “third-line” behind the on-airport first-line and second-line warehouse space, the most logical move.
“It’s off-airport, it has plenty of space in the warehouses and it’s also – and that is something – connected to the rail,” giving shipments sorted in the third-line logistics park multi-modal access from Belgium to China, said Steven Verhasselt, LGG’s vice president, commercial. “When a 747 comes in from Wuhan and you have to sort it out package-by-package and there are more than 10,000 packages … you simply cannot do it in a first-line airport environment. That’s not realistic.”
More space is not the only way to add more capacity to cargo operations. Improving technology within cargo communities at European airports can sometimes add extra capacity equal to a new warehouse simply by improving efficiency, and can scale with additional infrastructure improvements to continue to pay dividends in the future.
Roland Weil, vice president of sales for cargo at Fraport AG, told Air Cargo World that digitalization and data sharing have become priorities for cargo operations at Frankfurt Airport (FRA), but that “the smaller and midsized operators are reluctant to get on board with data sharing, and are concerned about competition.” Still, he said “paperless is the next step” in innovation, and major carriers like Lufthansa are adopting the technology advancements, like the electronic dangerous goods declaration (eDGD) that falls under the INFr8 software platform in pilot operation at FRA.
