When COVID-19 destroyed passenger demand last year, it caused massive collateral damage to the freight market.
IATA data [PDF] show a drop in belly cargo of 75% in April 2020, with recovery in belly freight loads remaining slow through the nearly year and a half since.
The factors in this slower recovery extend beyond simply the externality of travel restrictions constraining demand. For a start, older aircraft that were once stalwarts of the belly cargo market, like the Boeing 747 and 767, have been retired from many airlines’ fleets.
These have in many cases been replaced by smaller widebodies or even, in a growing number of cases, by longer-range narrowbody aircraft — aircraft that require different containerisation products than widebody aircraft.
As a result, explains Cristian Sutter, chief executive officer at cargo conversion provider Avensis Aviation, “all that belly freight capacity disappeared. All of a sudden, the traditional freighter industry ended up with situation where they said: “we only have X amount of capacity in the industry. Now that 50% of that is on the ground, we cannot fulfil it.” And coincidentally, e-commerce demand is skyrocketing at the same time. So it was a perfect storm.”
Also swirling in that storm was personal protective equipment, or PPE, the masks, visors, gowns and other items with which unprepared health services worldwide were trying to fight the first wave of COVID-19.
“The solution was to remove the seats and get boxes” into cabins, Sutter saus. “The problem with that was manual loading, but at that point, no one really cared about it because it was all about getting the PPE to the place it was needed, because we were in emergency mode.”
But moving out of that emergency mode is — and will remain — complicated.
Three main types of preighter operations come with pros and cons
Emergency air safety authorisations from governments desperate to fill up any aircraft they could to the brim with PPE meant that one of three kinds of zero-pax LOPA (layout of passenger accommodations) were created:
- floor cargo, with seats removed and cargo tied down to the floor
- seat cargo, with the seats left in and cargo loaded on top of them
- seat bag cargo, with the seats left in and cargo loaded into special bags or other containers
Each of these approaches has advantages and disadvantages, practically and logistically.
Floor cargo offers the most space at the least weight, although monuments are usually left inside the cabin, but requires the time, effort and storage costs to remove the seats, keep them safe and protected, and to reinstall them. There are also inherent questions as to the cycle durability of the floor tracking, which would normally see seats locked into it for a matter of years and then be covered with a protective liner, rather than items being hooked in and out on a daily basis.
Seat cargo and the need to secure it will inherently result in wear and tear to seat covers, plastics, inflight entertainment screens, foams, and in rarer cases the seat structure itself. The weight of the seats themselves, meanwhile, remains on board, while box weight will be constrained.
The seat bag cargo model, meanwhile, protects the seat but adds weight and, depending on how the bags are designed, can reduce the amount of cargo per double, triple or quad seat set if it has internal walls across them.
Preighter operations can’t replace the core business model
All the constraints of preighter operations mean that they are reasonably well suited for the express market, which is high-value, relatively high-volume, relatively low-weight.
The exception comes for electronics, particularly those with lithium-ion batteries, which come with a particular fire risk and thus cannot be carried in the cabin. Given the extent to which the annual release of iPhones in early Q4 and the Christmas rush in late Q4 [PDF] involves transporting this sort of materiel, this complicates matters.
Preighters have, in some ways, been able to mitigate the impact of externalities to the core business model of cargo aviation. But they are not permanent, long-term or even medium-term solutions. Regulatory approvals expire this year, and as passengers begin to travel again there is a point at which the logistics of operating preighters will become prohibitive at current or even stretch cargo prices.As a result, there is presently a market gap in freighter pricing between preighters (less than $500,000 to convert from a passenger aircraft, even for a full floor-cargo operation) and full converted freighters (some $15-20 million to add doors, cargo systems and so on).
Avensis is looking to fill this gap with temporary and semi-permanent conversion options including installing environmental/smoke/fire systems and proper cargo flooring, but inherently the problem of having to load packet freight by hand remains a constraint, among a variety of other logistical barriers.
Logistics and operations have responded to the need for preighter-driven change
Preighter operations bring a number of logistical challenges compared with either traditional airline belly freight or full-cargo aircraft operations, even for floor cargo operations where seats are removed.
Since only passenger doors can be used — rather than the lower deck cargo door for belly freight or the upper deck cargo hatch or 747 raising nose on dedicated freighters — that’s both a cargo size and loading logistics constraint.
At the same time, most airport facilities’ cargo loaders don’t go as high as the main deck doors, so it’s a matter in many cases of teams quite literally running it up airstairs, loading from the jetway, or using external lifts designed for catering supply.
Logistics systems from simple tracking to weight/balance calculations, too, are designed for cargo consolidation, palletisation and containerisation, rather than for box-by-box loading onto an aircraft. They must also take into account new items like cargo floor nets.
And, last but certainly not least, the cabin of the aircraft doesn’t contain the environmental, fire or smoke detection, or fire suppression systems that of a Class E or Class F cargo compartment, so crew — usually cabin crew but sometimes dedicated loadmasters — must patrol regularly with handheld firefighting equipment.
All this creates, adds and complicates logistics challenges, no matter which systems an airline is using to manage them. To meet these challenges, airlines are already implementing elements of the networking and integration of logistics that make up Logistics 4.0.
“Logistics 4.0 is all about digitalisation via the use of big data and AI to predict the market and to find solutions of optimising every single point of the supply chain,” Sutter explains. “What Logistics 4.0 is doing is using AI and big data to predict and adapt the system for these surges in demand and capacity. It’s all software driven, but that means that every single point of that supply chain needs to be digitalised and talking to the software.”
Fundamentally, the digitalisation of logistics is just one of the myriad nascent trends in commercial aviation accelerated by COVID-19. Whether, or how long, the various kinds of preighter operations are integrated into it remains — for now at least — unknown.
Author: John Walton
Published: 22nd July 2021
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