When Kiran Jain, director of marketing and route development at Bradley International Airport, needed to purchase curtains and furnishings for her new home, she saved money by having a number of custom-made items flown in from India.
Jain is like a lot of consumers who are helping to grow the air cargo freight business. Although Jain solicited the help of two interior designer friends for her purchases, the popularity of online shopping is taking the sting out of a drop in shipping manufacturing orders.
Online shopping is the single biggest motivator generating increases for the air cargo industry, said Stan Bernstein, president of the Regional Air Cargo Carriers Association, a Massachusetts-based national trade organization with 51 air carrier members.
“Some people say that they did all their holiday shopping on the Internet,” Bernstein said. Each time someone clicks to buy on item online, it needs to be shipped, a real bonus for the air cargo business, he explained.
Bradley Bonus
While worldwide freight traffic remains steady, particularly in Asia, Bernstein points to the industry’s small package freight and overnight mail as a key contributor to the domestic growth in the air cargo sector.
“We expect to see a 5 to 6 percent increase in air cargo this year mostly due to increases of Internet orders,” Bernstein said.
Similar to the national trend, Bradley’s total air cargo is up 4.5 percent this year over last year’s figures.
“[Air cargo] provides really critical support for the region’s long-term economic development,” said Fred Carstensen, director of the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis at the University of Connecticut.
Although recent economic studies did not identify what portion of the airport’s $2.5 billion in annual economic activity is directly related to the airport’s cargo business, Carstensen said it plays a “very, very important role at an airport like Bradley.”
According to a state Department of Economic and Community Development study, Bradley’s air cargo business employs nearly 900 people.
It is ranked 34th of 150 North American airports in terms of tons of freight and mail cargo handled, according to Airports Council International.
Residential Rise
The rise in Bradley’s residential air cargo business is helping the airport maintain that ranking and boost its cargo carriers’ bottom lines.
Take BAX Global, whose primary business has been shipping manufacturers’ heavy freight items. It now transports heavy freight residential items, said Bill Cote, area director of BAX Global at Bradley. BAX is tucked into the western portion of Bradley, along with Federal Express and several other cargo operations.
It isn’t that unusual anymore to see a pool table or a treadmill shipped in the mix of manufacturers’ pallets, Cote said, explaining, “Our B2B [business to business] has dropped off, and we are seeing more business to residential customers.”
He believes that Bradley could substantially increase its cargo business by better communicating the region’s advantages over its larger New England competitors, airports to its north in Boston and to its south in Newark and New York City, where most of the region’s international shipments initially land in the U.S.
“It’s cheaper here,” he said. “Bradley is in a perfect position to get more cargo. The opportunity is to make Bradley an alternative to Newark and Boston.”
Jain of Bradley agrees. “Our biggest predicament is that we are in the midst of two air cargo ports,” she said. “Our challenge is to go to freight forwarders in Boston and JFK in an educational manner, and tell them how we could do the same job here.”
Freight’s travel agents
So far, the effort is paying back some small dividends, Jain said, attributing some of Bradley’s increased cargo business to the airport’s marketing efforts with freight forwarders. Such firms provide a service similar to that of travel agents, but instead of finding space for people on an airplane, they find space for freight.
“The most critical element is increasing your relationship with the freight forwarders,” Jain said. “They are logistics people.”
One freight forwarder happy to be located at Bradley is Pilot Freight. Its business increased locally by 22 percent last year, said Kim Gajewski, Pilot’s regional vice president.
The Pennsylvania-based company has been operating a facility at Bradley for 26 years, she said, and has done so well that it now needs to lease warehouse space offsite.
Although Pilot Air also caters primarily to customers shipping heavyweight items, it started a home delivery system to get a piece of the residential action.
Gajewski echoes what others in the industry are saying about the need to offset manufacturing losses. The writing was on the wall eight to 10 years ago as manufacturers began setting up shops overseas, she said.
Another factor dramatically affecting Bradley’s air cargo business is that manufacturers have become more cost conscious, and therefore substantially decreased their overnight shipments.
As a result, air cargo companies are now partnering or adding a full range of transportation services to stay in the game, Gajewski said.
BAX is implementing that strategy through a merger with Schenker, part of the German-based Deutsche Bahn AG, which offers global ocean freight and European land transportation.
“To compete, you must be global,” said Cote of BAX.
