Paying it forward
Regardless of whether these airports are seeing increases or decreases in their handles, it’s usually a good idea to make sure the concerns of the forwarders are heard. And many of the top airports have responded with new improvement projects.
Polmans, for instance, said Brussels has been investing a lot of time and money in landside activities, often in cooperation with forwarders and shippers, including last year’s CEIV-Pharma cool chain certification project undertaken with the BRUcargo community. “Two of the main commodities we are focusing on are pharma and perishables. This should benefit our forwarders, as it will be better and easier for them to transport cargo via our airport,” he said.
In some cases, providing enough elbow room goes a long way. In Miami, Mangos said MIA has been working with the Florida Department of Transportation to rebuild N.W. 25th Street, the main corridor for the more than 5,000 freight trucks entering and exiting the cargo terminal every day. Improvements, which should be completed next year, will reduce traffic and travel times and separate the trucks from the commuter traffic. At Frankfurt, the airport widened the existing roadway to the cargo area to four lanes, providing better access, and opened a new truck parking facility at CargoCity South. The result has been less traffic congestion. In Hong Kong, HKIA has been adding new parking stands for freight trucks, including nine that have been added since last December.
Speeding up the customs process is also a plus. HKIA has set up its “Air Cargo Clearance System,” a round-the-clock electronic customs clearance service that makes the process paperless, which HKIA has achieved for about 60 percent of its air waybills.
Similarly, at Schiphol, three handling agents and three forwarders are beta-testing the airport’s “E-link project,” that replaces customs paperwork with a “smartcard” that keeps track of all relevant data for each shipment. So far, E-link has achieved 25 percent time savings for some processes, van Stekelenburg said.
Above all of these physical and digital improvements, there is the sense of community that some airports foster, including Amsterdam Schiphol, which has recently created what it calls its “Milk Run,” currently offered on a trial basis. Rather than have every forwarder go it to the cargo terminal to pick up shipments, the group pools its resources to hire one delivery firm to pick up all cargo from the handlers and deliver it to each forwarder. By cutting the trips to just one, van Stekelenburg explained, the airport can reduce traffic, time, noise, fuel and CO2 emissions. So far, he said, forwarders DHL, Panalpina and Nippon Express have taken part, along with handling agent Menzies, Bos Logistics and Cargonaut.
At Frankfurt, the forwarders have been organized into what’s called the Air Cargo Community Frankfurt, a registered association dedicated to representing the interests of air cargo-related companies at FRA, Schusdziara said. The community recently expanded, too, with five new members: Swissport Cargo Services Deutschland, Dachser, Thermotraffic, Sovereign Speed and my Logistics.