The air cargo industry came to Calgary Sept. 12-14, with The
International Air Cargo Association (TIACA) presenting the 23rd Air
Cargo Forum and Exposition. This event is only held every two years;
the last was in Bilbao, Spain and the next will be in Malaysia in 2008.
Some 3,000 delegates were registered from 85 countries. The 200-plus
exhibitors included 35 air carriers, 70 airports, 65 supporting
services companies from forwarders to handling and trucking, rounded
out by the booths of associations, media, educational institutions and
government.
Canada
had a strong presence with a major display front and centre where
CargoJet, Purolator and Air Canada Cargo represented carriers. The
airport displays, coordinated by the Canada Airports Council, included
the majors like Pearson, Trudeau, Vancouver and Calgary, but also
Edmonton, Winnipeg, Hamilton, Ottawa, Moncton, Halifax and Gander.
Prince
George was there promoting itself as an alternative to congestion at
Anchorage. Service companies in the exhibit included the GSAs for
WestJet and Air Transat.
The Forum kicked off with a panel of
CEOs, moderated by Paul Page, editor of Air Cargo World, that included
Alexey Isaikin of Russia’s Volga-Dnepr Group, Ulrich Ogiermann,
president of Cargolux, and Scott Dolan, president of United Airlines
Cargo. Their bios illustrated the mobility of the cargo industry –
Ogiermann had come from Lufthansa Cargo, Dolan had been with Atlas
Air/Polar Air Cargo, and Isaikin has recruited KLM vet (and Montrealer)
Stan Wraight to run his Group’s new Air Bridge Cargo scheduled service.
Another
interesting session dealt with air cargo’s impact on the global
economy, with panelists from the World Bank, Peru and Oxford, but the
most interesting participant was the moderator, Michael Ducker,
executive VP international for FedEx. A 31-year veteran, he noted that
Einstein had described the air cargo industry when he postulated that
time and space are relative. And while air cargo may carry less than 2%
of world trade by volume, it accounts for 40% of the value of goods
traded around this shrinking globe. The air cargo industry is a major
contributor in itself to GDP and employment but its real contribution
is in how air cargo facilitates 100% of the global economy, growing
twice as fast as GDP.
In other news, Boeing released its 2006
World Air Cargo Forecast, along with an order from Atlas Air for 12 of
the new B747-8F freighters, making Atlas the North American launch
customer for the aircraft. Boeing projects air cargo to average 6.1%
growth for the next 20 years, and to triple in volume by 2025. And the
Canada Airports Council briefed the press on its just-released paper on
international air policy reform calling for “Unilateral Open Skies” for
air cargo services; the call for greater liberalization was oft
repeated at the conference.
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